Measuring wellbeing: a History of Italian living standards

A journey back in time to discover how the Italians defeated hunger, poverty, and premature death; how they transformed the peninsula into a modern and hospitable country, and how they managed to become a people among the most prosperous on the planet. Measuring Wellbeing documents this 150-year journey, beginning on March 17, 1861, the day the Kingdom of Italy was born. The narration follows the trajectories of a wealth of newly constructed historical statistics on consumption and income, nutrition and health, education, migration flows, and political freedom. In more than twenty years of research, Giovanni Vecchi has gathered tens of thousands of family budgets. This unique database allows the themes of economic inequality, poverty, and vulnerability to be placed at the center of the book. The focus shifts away from the “average” Italian; the story is not of some Italians but of all Italians, of the disparities in their incomes, their deprivation and their wealth, all the way from 1861 to the present. The collaboration of numerous scholars of international renown testifies to the quality of the research and the breadth of its scope. Measuring Wellbeing contains pages of original economic history, recounted with the intention not only of judging the past and understanding the present, but also of reflecting on the uncertainty of the future: for several decades now, the wellbeing of the Italian people has been at the crossroads between progress and decline.