Women’s fertility decisions save the planet from environmental ruin (Book excerpt)

How can women’s fertility decisions save the world from environmental disaster? Find out in this excerpt from From 9 to 5 – The Life and Work of Solomon Isarebe 2008-2093 by Anne Wyeth, a fictional biography of one of the most influential people of the 21st century. The book explores how one man foresaw the potential of population change to reverse global warming and how he told governments around the globe that low fertility rates would save the Earth without ruining economic growth.

Book excerpt: From 9 to 5 by Anne Wyeth

This abridged and edited excerpt from From 9 to 5 — The Life and Work of Solomon Isarebe 2008-2093 is reprinted with permission from the publisher, Coil Press Ltd. At this point in the book, Solomon ‘Dizzy’ Isarebe and his stepsister Isabelle Isarebe, have run out of money for their ground-breaking research. Their poet mother Reba, has written to one of her fans, Rita Bortelli, asking for help:

Although Reba Isarebe claimed to have no knowledge of Bortelli’s work or fortune, the tone of her eLetter indicates she knew Bortelli had the financial capacity to help and was seemingly willing to risk her friendship in order to assist her children:

Janni and I sit like bewildered enraptured fools at Iz and Dizzy’s feet. They are totally glorious when they speak to each other. I think Janni understands some of what they’re saying, but I feel their words washing over me like a great Hokusai wave, subsuming me, tumbling me, till I can’t tell sky from earth.

I want you to meet them Rita. Come soon, come tomorrow, come the day after. I have no right to ask, so please forgive.

Rita flew to the UK two days later and was introduced to Isabelle and Solomon, who were huddled in their pyjamas, dressing gowns and slippers in front of the tiny mid-July fire in the dark living room of Hilman Cottage. Solomon reluctantly started to talk to Bortelli, once he had established she wasn’t ‘just another of mum’s poetry nuts’, while Isabelle stood behind him, nearly lost in the shadows. He talked and then talked faster and faster, according to Bortelli, ‘like some Kerouacian-drug-fuelled-beat-maniacal-poet-economist’, explaining their breakthroughs in researching and analysing individual and group decision-making and its application in understanding the future of women in the world. At some point, Isabelle Isarebe came out of the shadows, kissed Rita Bortelli on the lips and ‘escaped like a weightless wraith up the staircase darkness.’

Four months later Isarebe & Isarebe had been given enough funding from Bortelli for the next five years of their research and she was to be a benefactor who stayed loyal to them for life. Bortelli reflected on this in an interview with the Washington and New York Post:

I put up some money, because I loved their mom. She was my best friend, my mother, my sister, my daughter, my hero, and I had only met her the once until that day in their tiny, claustrophobic cottage on a dripping Herefordshire hillside. Her kids were crazy, I mean crazy, crazy smart, and they talked to each other without listening or even speaking sometimes, but understanding everything the other said before the sentence was started. Dizzy was sort of scary, he had something of the Messianic about him, whilst Izzy was a cross between some genius angel and a gypsy princess – she was irresistible and the real clever one. I’ll never forget the chaste kiss she gave me on that first night – it was the purest, sweetest-smelling moment of my life and it brings tears to me, even now.

At the time their research was being undertaken, average global fertility was already below the population maintenance figure of 2.1 children per woman, even though the global population was still rising. Most other institutions in the 2040s were predicting a relatively slow fall in fertility in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population was still expanding rapidly, and a slow rise in fertility rates in those countries where fertility rates had fallen well below the population maintenance level. Their consensus was that global fertility would converge at around 1.75 children per woman.

The Isarebes could find no scenarios under which they could replicate these fertility predictions. They concluded that sub-Saharan countries would almost certainly see fertility rates fall much more quickly than the central estimates in other models, whilst many wealthy countries with already low fertility rates would see a further slow drop in fertility rates. In combination, this meant they predicted average global fertility at the end of their forecast period would be closer to 1.4, compared with the 1.75 arrived at by many others.

These conclusions were not revolutionary in themselves. What was new was their conclusion that it was highly unlikely this could be reversed by political initiatives.

Their research showed that for around 78% of families, the decision of whether to have a first child or another child would not be greatly influenced by anything offered to them by governments or employers but would largely be determined by the circumstances of their lives. 15% of families were only motivated to consider having a child or another child by the most extreme financial or other incentives, and most of these were people with one child, considering whether or not they should have a second. The remaining 7% were more susceptible to financial incentivisation and were in many cases from very low-income households. The Isarebe’s work showed that any attempt to influence fertility in richer countries, whether through financial incentives, coercion or attempts to change cultural norms – known somewhat disparagingly at that time as ‘nudging’ – would be expensive and largely ineffective.

Further modelling showed for most of those people where incentives would apparently encourage the decision to have a baby, it would only bring that decision forward rather than fundamentally affecting decisions on family size. This led to the Isarebes stating that for almost all countries, incentivising people to have larger families would be an almost entirely wasted investment.

Their study concluded that falling fertility, which Solomon Isarebe believed was ‘perhaps the single most important change in human behaviour since we first set foot on earth’, was not in the hands of politicians, industry or social influencers, but was under the control of billions of individual women. The Isarebes believed this was ‘a new form of behavioural democracy, where individual women’s fertility decisions are shaping the future of the planet.’

Get your copy of From 9 to 5 — The Life and Work of Solomon Isarebe 2008-2093 on Amazon today.

About fictional author Anne Wyeth

Anne Wyeth is a fictional author, living in the 22nd century. A renowned economic historian, curator and commentator, she has written several books on the life of Solomon Isarebe and is a fellow of St Aubrey’s College, Cambridge. Married to the sculptor Michel Harring, she received the NAA for services to economics in 2148. She spends her time between her homes in Pennsylvania, USA and Cambridge, England.

Wyeth is the creation of Jonathan Francis, the founder of Coil Press. Francis set up Coil Press to explore potential world futures, through collaboration with fellow artists, statisticians, economists, anthropologists, scientists, forecasters and demographers.

Top image of Anne Wyeth courtesy of Coil Press.