Defining and measuring quality of life and wellbeing, between complexity and limits

Recently, the debate on new measures of wellbeing reached a wide audience especially thanks to the big media’s “ballyhoo”. That debate, very often accompanied by Robert Kennedy’s word (March 18, 1968, speech at Kansas University) has been urged also thanks to many prestigious initiatives, like the commission appointed by French President in 2008 and now known through the chairs’ names (Stiglitz, Sen e Fitoussi). Actually, defining what a good society is, and consequently its observation and monitoring, should take into account two important and interrelated concepts, complexity and limit. In order to measure and monitor country’s wellbeing, a systematic approach is needed, leading from concept to measure, then synthesis and then interpretation. This work aims at (i) clarifying different issues concerning wellbeing of societies by providing conceptual instrument allowing anyone to orient oneself among all the emerging proposals and to distinguish between serious and propagandistic ones; (ii) unravelling some important methodological aspects that should be considered in constructing indicators.