Public Happiness and the Measurement of Well-being

Abstract

We are currently witnessing an important debate about the need, felt by significant players in civil society, to find something better than GDP as an indicator of national well-being. Some scholars and politicians, furthermore, suggest these new indicators of well-being are to be found in new technologies for measuring subjective happiness, new indicators that ought to accompany or substitute the present measure of GDP or other objective indicators. This article shows that the topic of well-being or happiness has a long history, because it has characterized the entire Italian tradition with regard to civil economy. In the second part, it looks more closely at the limitations of GDP and at some of the challenges faced by the need for new indicators.