Crescita, felicità e benessere: l'idea di Sismondi alla base di nuovi indicatori di contabilità nazionale (Growth, happiness and wealth: Sismondi'd ideas as foundations of new national account indexes)

Aim of this paper is to trace the recent discussions in order to build a link between the words ‘happiness’ and ‘economy’ in order to reduce the economic discipline in an ethical and relational dimension. After lively debates philosophical and moral since the time of Aristotle, the question of happiness is the protagonist in modern research of economists, especially in the work Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi whose studies on the economics of happiness were pioneering. In recent decades, from the formulation of the «paradox of happiness» by Easterlin (1974), and with the subsequent work of Scitowsky (1976), which definitively put in crisis assumptions of neoclassical economic theory, economists have focused on those variables economic, social and demographic trends affecting the well-being of individuals, distancing from the purely individualistic vision of homo oeconomicus and reversing the utilitarian assumption that necessarily ‘more is preferred to less’, landing at alternative theories to the rational school, thanks to the contributions of cognitive psychology. The analysis is directed, in particular, to identify the most appropriate indicators compared to traditional ones for a measurement of well-being that really reflects the people’s quality of life