Demographics, Productivity, and the Culture that supports them

From Does Israel have the Key to Modernity's Fatal Flaw? by CDR Salamander.  He is primarily promoting a interview with Dr. Paul Morland which does look interesting.

However, his opening paragraphs are arresting because it shifts the focus from the noise of day-to-day to the fundamentals.  

From East Asia, to the Americas, to Europe, to really any nation considered ‘developed’, there is a future problem. It isn’t climate change. It isn’t food. It isn’t fuel. It isn’t what everyone likes to talk about.

The problem is that the human race is trying to extinct itself.

You can fake a lot of things, but you can’t fake demographics. Kids are born. People die. You have a census. The math is exact.

This is a variant of my constant theme - everything in society is derivative from increasing productivity.  All the progress and goodness arising since the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution in the past 250 years are due to the dramatic increase in productivity arising from those two foundational events.  

And, left unstated, all productivity rests on humans.  Science and systems and process innovation can mitigate declining population for a while (see Japan post-1997 financial crisis.)  And in theory, there is no reason why one might not be able to achieve a rate of productivity increase that is greater than the rate of population decrease.  But the risks are far higher and porbability of that happening far lower.

I liked his point though - whether it is the legacy mainstream media, or a New World Order, or the self-interest of the establishment, or random chance - we do keep focusing on unserious matters.  Demographics and Productivity (and, I would add, culture) are the key to prosperity and instead we are encouraged to focus on 

Climate change

GMO free food

Renewable energy

Trans rights

Economic inequality

And the like

All of these issues and their associated policies are deleterious to healthy demographics and productivity increases.

Whether you consider these obsessions a form of attack or a form of suicide is, perhaps, moot.  The end result is oblivion.