Learning 23 things

I am at present engaging, or at last commencing, in PhD research at UL. The thesis point at which I start is that the nature of the housing that we design has a significant effect on demographic trends. I believe that declining demography, as in declining birth rates, (in all developed European countries now below replacement level), is probably the most pressing issue that these countries will face over the remainder of the century. It is exacerbated to some extent by the decline in cultural confidence which is a mark of the modern "west", that area of the world formerly defined by Christendom and later by the "enlightenment". I am in the process of looking at the decline in those countries which first exhibited the phenomenon of hyper aging, which is defined as having a proportion of the over 65's in the population greater than 30%. The three countries which are at or imminently approaching this level are Germany, Italy and Japan, three very different cultures...