Well, if we follow this scheme it's difficult, as yet, to get it to fit. But we can make at least correlations between aspects of livability and aspects of life-ability. And if we look at the kind of society where policymakers head -- that's their main business -- then, for instance, you can say, "Well is there a correlation between happiness and the differences
So we are pretty close in understanding why these things differ. There is what's the livability , but now the life-ability. And now actually we move to that first diagram of Switzerland. And now the question is: why are people within a country
We are overrunning them. And residents are pushing back because it's impacting their livability . Their cost of living is increasing, congestion on the road, rental prices, food prices.
Granted, they used them-- they used the leaves as food for a lot of the livestock that came into the city-- not something that we're still using trees for. But they also really saw that the shading and the livability that it added to what was otherwise quite a stinky and smelly city with its canals and all of the waste in that, they actually-- they structurally, systematically first started planting linden trees, and then they moved to elms,
So I just want to have that up and then read a little bit from the prologue of this book, "Queer Embodiment," which is titled "Neither/Nor, Notes on Theory and Livability ," and it starts with an epigraph from Butler, who I've been reading since I was a tiny child and I can't stop, for better or worse.
Okay, so it's possible to get happier than we are. And what can policy makers do? Well, they can improve the livability of the environment which is their prime job, but they could also improve the life-ability of individuals at least indirectly. If we do it this way then you can focus on society as a whole, but you can also focus on institutions
And then I think that's what's changed now, though, is that it used to be only that. Bring the countryside into the city centers to offer that place of mental healing for its citizens and that piece of livability . But now those limited park spaces and trees that we have left have to fulfill this laundry list of duties.
And it's great. It's a great kind of invention and we want to support those things, I just-- we shouldn't be giving them a lot of subsidies, I think. I think of the issue as climate danger, danger to the livability of climate.
There was just a little girl who was actually killed, unfortunately, walking across the street just a couple weeks ago. And it remains this large transportation question, but also this livability question for the neighborhood--how to make this particular neighborhood, this particular node of the city greener and more livable.
There are qualities in your environment; there are qualities in yourself; and that gives us four qualities of life which all have been named happiness at some point. But I give them other names: chances in the environment, that's the livability of the environment; chances in yourself; that's your life-ability. So the best possible life-ability is in heaven, but some people are so neurotic, so low ability
We're talking about minimizing impact. And even the way we talk about climate reveals this, because we don't talk about climate danger or climate livability , which are human terms. We talk about climate change, as if change, as such, is bad.
Okay, once you know to what extent people differ, you can try to get a look at the determinants. In thinking about the determinants, this scheme which I showed you, this conceptual scheme, makes sense because you can say, "Well how happy people are will depend on the livability of their environment and also on their life-ability." And in doing so, you think actually the way