Oldal 175 [175]
A Few Worbs ON GLOBAL OVERPOPULATION 173
rapid population growth and the dwindling number of people generate challenges
and constraints that need to be accommodated. Rapid growth puts an enormous
burden on the network of institutions. In areas of high population density, there
is a need for a great number of kindergartens, adequate housing, clean and healthy
water, communal transportation capacities, and a great deal of other things. Even
such a small demographic wave as the birth of the so-called Ratké grandchildren
in the mid-1970s required that certain primary schools in Hungarian cities work
in two shifts. Some children had to go to school in the afternoon because there
were not enough schoolrooms. On the other hand, a declining population gradually
erodes the foundations of this institutional network. It becomes ever more expensive
to maintain schools and hospitals and the growing burdens of old-age social
insurance and health care have to be covered from the revenues from ever fewer
taxpayers, as the proportion of old people within society has grown enormously.
It can be concluded that the typical problems of overpopulation are concentrated
in urban, metropolitan areas, as the people from the provinces all flood into the
cities in search of livelihood. The effects of population decline mostly characterize
the depopulated rural and small-town areas (Jarzebski et al. 2021; Konsella 2001;
Makkai et al. 2017).
On the whole, most problems related to the decline of the population appear
manageable — at least in the opinion of the present author. They are mostly
questions of reallocation, taxation and institutions — areas where it is far easier to
modify than to influence the demographic behavior of the population. If one also
considers how intensively the realm of work is being transformed and how rapidly
the automation processes supported by new generations of artificial intelligence
and learning algorithms are spreading, then the shrinking labor force is perhaps
not such an immense problem (Lutz et al. 2008). It is time to accustom ourselves
to the idea that in the 21“ century, it is no longer the number of people who can
be deployed for work or warfare that indicates the strength of a nation or society
but the technology it possesses.
An overpopulated planet?
The question of how many people can be sustained by Earth is unscientific and
cannot be answered with a single number based on scholarly thought. First, one
ought to define what is meant by sustaining: the minimum necessities for life or
middle-class welfare?
When we think about sustainability from a historical perspective, we keep
coming up against Malthus’s conclusion: there were indeed situations in which
relatively closed autarchic social-economic systems collapsed, owing to the
agricultural crisis. The famines that periodically hit China, the fall of the mysterious
civilization of the Christmas Islands, or in modern times the potato famine in
19th-century Ireland warn of the dangers of local overpopulation.
Before being overcome by anxieties about the future, let us recall the historical
experience that despite all local crises, in the long run, humanity is living in
increasing welfare. Just in the last few years, literally hundreds of millions have
risen out of abject poverty, first of all thanks to the growth of China, and also
India. Though calculating the threshold of poverty generated much dispute, it