Maurizio Pugno is Full Professor of Economics at the University of Cassino, Italy. He studied at Cambridge, UK (M.Phil.) and Birkbeck, London. He taught at the University of Trento, Italy, and at the International PhD School of S. Anna, Pisa, Italy.
He published theoretical, empirical, and historical articles and books on economic growth, structural change, human and social capital, and job satisfaction. In his recent book, On the Foundations of Happiness in Economics, he studies happiness from a theoretical and historical point of view.
Economic growth has extraordinarily increased the availability of market goods to satisfy people’s need for comfort, but at the same time it has also raised great challenges to their working, family, and personal lives. Will people learn the skill necessary to cope with these challenges and take full enjoyment from economic growth? The book of Maurizio Pugno explores this question starting from the insights of Tibor Scitovsky (Budapest 1910 – Stanford 2002), and approaching a theory of ‘human welfare’. Along this…
Sen’s ‘capability approach’ is especially focused on human development as freedom from deprivations, while Scitovsky’s The Joyless Economy is focused on how people can expand their internal capability endogenously by enjoying learning as a socially embedded process. This paper uses the complementarity between the two authors to build a comprehensive dynamic approach to people’s ‘functionings and capabilities’. Different groups of ‘functionings’ are thus characterised by their different patterns of development in interaction with the resources available and the social context.…
