 As Mike Bloomberg often says, if you can't measure something, you can't manage it. And that applies to companies and it applies to countries. And right now the question of how we're managing the global economy is critically important. It's something we write about a lot of the financial times with our partners at Nikkei. And it's something which is becoming very, very important for policy makers. So we have a fantastic group of people to talk about it. On my opposite me is Doug Peterson, who is President and Chief Executive Officer of S&P Global. Next to him is Mariana Mazzucata, who is Professor of Economics and also author of a book, The Value of Everything, which is exactly about this question of what's wrong with GDP. And on my immediate left, your right is Hezo Takaraka, who was former Finance Minister, Economics Minister in Japan and is now Professor at Keio University. Now the issue of how we look at GDP is particularly relevant because this was basically a 20th century construct. It was created to measure manufacturing industrial processes that dominated the world in the 20th century. But we've moved on. We have digital world, we have the environmental issues, things that really are starting to impinge. So Doug, when you look at this issue as someone who's not an economist, not a policy maker, but in the data business at S&P, what do you think about how we're using GDP today? Well first of all, GDP is so critical for us as a CEO and as executive because we use it to make decisions about where we're going to invest. So when we're looking around the world where we want to invest, where we're going to put our new operations, we look to see where is their growth. So it has consequence for people like me to look at where we're going to be investing. When we talked earlier about the new economy, in the old economy, the old GDP that you just described, not only was it built around a manufacturing economy, a farm-based economy, the way that information is gathered is still antiquated. Can you imagine how much information there is at Amazon and Mastercard and new ways to gather information? We can talk more about that. The other part that's still antiquated is there's many activities that aren't picked up. You don't pick up informal activity, so you don't pick up cash-based activity, which in many economies is large. So the black market basically? Well no, different. Not the black market. The grey market or? The cash market. Let's put a tax evasion and then you've got another market, it's homework, people that work at home and then you have the illegal market. So there's parts of it and some economies that's up to 35% of GDP that's missed. So the illegal market is an issue or the grey market and the informal markets. Informal markets. The digital size is an issue and of course environment too. But Mariana, you wrote an entire book about what's wrong with this. Give us a praisey. So the book wasn't on GDP, it was actually on value and of course what underlies GDP is what we value. So if we're not valuing care and care is often done for free in the home, then it doesn't get measured and that's a huge problem. In fact, if you marry your babysitter, GDP goes down. So don't do it. A service that was being paid for around care all of a sudden may be still being done, simply not being paid for. Anyway, there's lots of weird things like that in GDP. But I think what's interesting is we could actually squeeze so much more out of GDP even as it currently exists. So much interesting things are being said around the world about what to add to it in terms of well-being and happiness. But even with its current state, you could break down GDP in two different ways, either by income or by product. And if you look at income, so profits, wages, rents, do we really understand the difference between profits and rents today? Rent used to be called unearned income to the point that most of the financial sector up until 1970 wasn't even included in GDP because it was basically seen as a transfer just like social security payments. When they did include it, investment banks, the idea was that they're risk-taking, that's the service they're providing. Of course when they went bust, who picked up the risk, the taxpayer anyway. And commercial banks, financial intermediation. But breaking down what actually ended up happening with finance, finance largely ended up financing itself, finance, insurance and real estate, the extent to which we could also start breaking down is it really creating value, is it extracting value, which bits are really creating value and differentiating that. But even just the other way to look at it would be in terms of demand, consumption, investment, government spending and net exports. A country like the UK is currently mainly growing through consumption, not investment. That consumption is being driven by private debt, so the ratio of private debt to disposable income is back at record levels. That you can see with just GDP as it stands without any happiness, but no one's talking about that. It should be in the front pages of the Financial Times. OK, well we're going to come back into what caused the crisis. We're going to come back in a moment and talk about what can be done to fix this. But the idea that once upon a time Wall Street wasn't even measured in GDP might be taken as quite insulting for a lot of the big financial titans, but it also shows the type of problems there are and how statistics just don't keep up with changes in the economy. But I'd like to ask you, you were in charge of the Japanese economy and trying to set policy using the statistics that you had available How good were they? Did you trust them? Well, when I was in the cabinet as a minister for economic fiscal policy, I was asked to rate GDP. You were asked to rate GDP? I was asked by many people to rate GDP. However, how reliable GDP is. Of course we have a lot of problems mentioned by other people. However, it is very important to notice that GDP has a relatively short history. In 1929, we had the Great Depression. At that time, many people understand the importance of the... We need some measure to grasp the situation of the economy comprehensively. At that time, in the 1930s and the 40s, my next-century economists like Simon Kuznet and some others created this system of national account. And since then, so this has GDP statistics that only 80 years history, just like the human being lifespan. So, during this short period, this has been amended a lot. Still, we need at this moment more new type of amendment. We live in a new economy. But in this case, we should understand clearly what is a new economy? What is a new economy? We are smart technology. We live in the forced industrial revolution. So, in this regard, first of all, later on, we will discuss another aspect, the environment and sustainability and inclusiveness issues. But anyway, as far as smart technology age is concerned, while Japan, the Japanese government, changed the system in the way of the calculation of GDP four years ago. And at that time, Japan's GDP increased by 3.5%. To be specific, as you know, the R&D investment was also added to GDP. But R&D investment was added just at the intermediate expense, not the final expense. But maybe you understand, R&D investment is a very important investment to create the stock of knowledge. So, since then, we have been very much to great attention on the importance of intangible asset. R&D is very easy to understand, but very intangible asset we have. Anyway, so, the similar change of calculation of GDP was taken by Korea, Ireland, and these old countries, GDP was increased a little bit. So, it is very important to know the new age, the forced industrial revolution, the role of intangible asset. Well, you make a very good point there. And the case of Japan is very interesting because not only do you have, obviously, an age-shrinking population, and people often say, oh, the Japanese economy is in the doldrums because GDP has not been impressive. But the fact you've brought in the investment into the equation is striking. An intangible issue is striking too. I mean, Doug, how do you think statisticians should be actually trying to capture the intangible element? Oh, absolutely. And when you think about some of the aspects of GDP, the measurement, one is the intangible. In some ways, it's almost about utility as opposed to a cash flow or what was measured that has a monetary value. Another aspect is you're not measuring depletion, either. So, because GDP is a flow and not a stock, you could be creating a very strong GDP but depleting your assets, depleting some of the things we could talk about ESG factors where you're depleting the environment and you're not picking that up. But on the intangible, let me give you an example of what we have today. If you think about when I was growing up, I had to go to the Encyclopedia Britannica to get information. Now I have this little computer in my pocket and I can get information at my fingertip and that's not measured at all in a GDP, the information, the substitution of how I get that value. And I'm not an expert in this but I'm always asking the question, how do you measure utility and value created as opposed to something that is a cash flow or something that's measured in a delivery of cash. One quick example, if I were using a travel agent to purchase a ticket but now there's a new way I do it by using a website, that work didn't go away of booking a ticket. It's no longer being paid for at a travel agent so GDP might have gone down. But the work created, the value created is still there. So this is something I'm trying to figure out. How do you capture value created in utility? So how do you, I mean are there any countries, I mean obviously Japan has taken one step forward by including investment and trying to capture some of the intangibles. But are any countries doing this right? I mean Mariana, you've been looking at these. All the countries that are run by women. I hate to say, I was just thinking, New Zealand, Iceland, Scotland, Finland. Hey, correlation. I mean can I just say something, can we have a bit of time? The issues you mentioned are so crucial. But what you're talking about are drivers of long-term GDP growth. That already becomes another variable. Are we just talking about a little blip in GDP or long-term driver? And you mentioned Cousness. Cousness was so clear, he's like, oh by the way, don't use this to talk about 1.7, 1.78, 1.8% increase in GDP. Remind the audience with Cousness. One of the founders of GDP which he mentioned exactly. He said, use it for kind of a muscle manual kind of a trend, but not as though you're steering a car exactly where to go. And I think what's so interesting in Europe, for example, we look so much at the deficit or the debt. And as soon as you divide the debt by GDP, already it becomes more refined. And so Italy, for example, is always accused that it's spending too much, but it hasn't. Its deficit has been on 2% to 3%, often lower than Germany's. But debt to GDP, very high. Why? Because the long run drivers of GDP, things like productivity, have not grown for almost 20 years in Italy. And so, again, we could actually, with existing measures, say a lot, but we don't talk about this in Europe. We just told Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, cut, cut, cut, you're spending too much. And the other thing about R&D, that as well we don't really have an understanding of how to make sure that what we're spending on, in terms of public budgets, are in fact more steered towards these long run drivers. So R&D is still, in many countries, just seen as a cost, as opposed to capital expenditure for long run growth. And especially in software, right? Software is definitely booked as a cost, but I think of software as almost like a capital investment, but it doesn't get treated like that. You see, this comes back to the point about if you can't measure it, you can't manage it properly. And this is leading potentially to big policy mistakes. I'm curious, in the case of Japan, there was so much discussion about the lost decade of stagnant growth. Do you think people need to rethink their impression of the Japanese economy if they have a different vision of the Japanese statistics? And I don't mean to pick on Japan, but you are the policymaker on the panel and there's a lot of interest in this. Well, it's a very difficult issue because, well, many people recognise the importance of GDP of course. Because, as I mentioned, it shows the very comprehensive economic activity. However, at the same time, some factors should be added. Well, one is the international asset issue. Another one is environmental issue, for example. So we have been discussing this environmental issue for many, for a long time. As you know, in 1970s, already 1970s, we have discussions. Economic council of the economic planning agency of the Japanese government established a new idea of NANW, a net national welfare. Net national welfare. In this case, the environmental issue was considered into GDP. To be specific, the imputed cost of the environment should be subtracted from GDP. As a result of that, at that time, GDP was reduced by 2%. Some should be reduced. So we have a lot of discussions on that. Still, an important point is, well, we should not depend too much on a single indicator. GDP is a very important indicator. However, for example, please consider my body condition. My weight, height, blood pressure, et cetera, et cetera. We could not depend on a single indicator. But still so, a moderate amendment, moderate improvement of GDP statistics needed. But we should consider some other supplemental indicators. At this moment, I think this is very important. So when you say, I mean, you made an interesting point about the media, that obviously the financial press and the markets tend to hang on these data releases, what do you think people should be talking about on a new basis? I mean, what should we be putting on the front page of the Financial Times or the Nikkei or the Nikkei Asian Review? Our books. Well, I mean, again, if we come back to what we know drives GDP growth, for example, we know that certain types of institutions are fundamentally important. And even just within Europe, we have very different types of institutions. For example, that link or don't link science and industry. The Fraunhofer Institutes, for example, in Germany, they don't necessarily exist in other parts of Europe. And if we think that they're important for having that kind of productivity growth or vocational training, education, or indeed kind of spending, then we would be looking on our dashboard in terms of the health of the country, those kind of indicators, as well as, of course, a more refined analysis recently around well-being of the nation and different types of happiness indicators. But then you could argue that then Europe, for example, when it's giving out bailouts to countries that are having problems, instead of having these conditions that are also just about one number, reduce your deficit. So the IMF conditions or the ECB numbers saying that you have to do X, Y and Z based on debt to GDP or deficit. Yeah, if they want that country to become more competitive, they could actually also be giving more refined advice, not just reduce your deficit, but hey, you really need to start building these institutions, which we know through evidence base, and that's more of a dashboard understanding of competitiveness and health of an economy. Right. And these are really profound policy issues which you were grappling with when you were in office. But can I turn to another question, which is, is there any way to change how we collect data? Because I find it just astonishing that we have these tech giants who have the tools to know what we had for lunch before we even eat it, who can track everything we do all the time and are selling the data to each other or the whole data brokerage industry. And yet we have to wait for an entire month or sometimes a lot longer to get GDP statistics. Is there a better way to start actually collecting data about the economy? Did you ever try and ask any of your tech companies to help you? Well, a big real issue. It's of course very important. Last year Prime Minister Abe appeared here and he made an excellent speech focusing on the importance of the data free-flow with trust. Well, this is a very important topic that has been discussed in this double meeting. But still, for example, where big data, data is important at the same time, well, in order to calculate GDP, various kind of indicators need it. So you mentioned well what kind of statistics we watch. GDP is very important. GDP appears only every quarter, on every quarter, once or three months. So it's very limited. This is still very important. At the same time, we need much more frequent statistics needed. Well, of course, economists have been discussing as you know open statistics or open coefficient like that. Well, very frequent GDP fluctuations should be reflected in the rate of unemployment, etc, etc. So in that sense, well, there are policy makers, policy analysts watching this kind of statistics. So in that sense I'd like to say some kind of dashboard type of indicator. Dashboard type of indicator is needed. For example, World Economic Forum issues the competitiveness ranking. They are combining several, well, 50 or 50 indicators. So the combination, combining these statistics is very important for the viewpoint of policy makers. S&P is in fact scraping data all the time. In trade, I know you've got some extraordinary activities happening. Yes, so in the trade area we have now, we've got access to almost every port and airport in the world, and we extract that data daily unless that port or airport doesn't have it. Then we put it into a database and we can see that we will know sometimes that Apple has changed the battery that they're using or the lens is using before the markets do because we can see the shipments that are going around the world. So my answer to the question is absolutely you could be using new data techniques, machine learning, alternative ways to gather data. An example that's happening right now, every 10 years the United States does a census and this year the census is going to go out and they're going to do it in a way that's electronic. And you can use it on paper, using the internet, you can use it on your phone, you can do it in paper, and they only expect that about 65% of the people are going to do one of those three, which means there's still going to be 35% of the people that they're going to have to go hire 300 to 600,000 people as part-time workers to go finish the census. So in the Department of Commerce is attempting this new approach using the phone and the internet, and I do think that it's a good step that they're trying new about gathering fundamental data but there's so many more ways you could do it. But the keyword is fundamental data and that's different from the speed you know how quick you can get the data. You could also argue that we have information overload, do you really need to know GDP figures every kind of 5 seconds and in fact getting more refined analysis precisely around the digital economy. There's this great book out called Surveillance Capitalism and this notion of the behavioral surplus, this book by Shoshana Zuboff. She says that the people think they're searching Google for free, but actually Google is searching you for free. And so this whole again difference between value creation, value extraction, can we actually start using different types of measures that really tell us the way that we're using the power of the algorithms and new technologies in ways that really contribute to a healthier, more productive capacity in our economy versus a more extractive one. Yes. Dac ar agus ynde? May I raise another important aspect of statistics? Of course of GDP or debt-GDP ratio this is very important. It's also very important to get a quick information about from the from the gather. At the same time by analyzing these indicators we can understand very clearly the strengths and the weakness of this company with this economy. For example in the case of the United Kingdom for example investment is high value, consumption is high value and so on. So in this regard for example I go back to the intangible investment, intangible asset well in the case of Japan intangible investment GDP ratio is about 9%. This is clearly lower than that of the United States in the case of the United States 15% or so maybe, but the contents of the intangible investment is more important issue for Japan for example while around the investment Japanese businesses have been investing for this R&D relatively high this R&D investment GDP ratio in Japan is not relatively high however another kind of intangible investment especially human resource investment and expenditures on organizational reform this is very weak in Japan so by analyzing this intangible asset or intangible investment well we can understand the weakness and the strength of the economy company this kind of function is very important to make use of this kind of statistics this is another important aspect of statistics right I'm aware that there are a lot of people in the room who are experts in this field and have a lot to say so I'm going to turn to the audience of questions in just a moment but before I do Mariana can you give us go back to some of the examples you see which are actually encouraging amongst the countries in dealing with this issue because obviously a lot of the economic reporting in the world tends to be dominated by Europe the Eurozone America, Japan, big countries are there case studies of countries which have been creative and actually doing the kind of things you're talking about well I think what's interesting is the conversations changing from just the measures to well what are we even trying to do so if we have the sustainable development goals which we're signed up to by hundreds of countries what does that then mean for the value, the kind of economies that we're trying to create and what's interesting is that at the microeconomic level that conversation is really having impact on the metrics right whether it's ESG or better types of metrics within companies and whether they're really reaching these targets around those types of social factors and I think what's interesting is can we then link that conversation which is about governance of organizations in business and other to given that then we do aggregate up statistics about companies also to get parts of the figures for GDP what does that then look like at the macroeconomic level and yet the conversations about the environment for example in GDP is not linked up to that governance of the microeconomic unit I mean I'm not the only one who thinks so that there is a bit of washing in terms of talking a lot about the environment and then if you look again at the figures of what's actually happening in finance the top three asset management companies BlackRock, Vanguard and another one that I can't remember saying have actually increased their spending on fossil fuel based companies by 35% since Paris since COPS in 2015 so the talk turning it into a walk will be much easier when these metrics first of all are mandatory but also when the kind of micro and the macro really are more lined up I mean Doug you're trying to bring in these green factors into credit ratings aren't you and you're trying really for the first time to systematically look at these non-traditional economic metrics when you look at companies can that be extended to countries as well well I think so and I think but to your point starting at the micro level so to call it the corporate level it's going to be important because that will drive behavior if we start measuring companies we have more standardized approach to measuring ES and G factors right now the S is hard to get there's not a lot out there the social factors it's not very well defined the governance has been around a long time and on the environmental factors it's not consistent it's hard to get the information so at the corporate level right now if we want to get the data and we're actually gathering ourselves it's not audited it's not consistent people don't measure it the same way and in fact one of the really valuable discussions that we've been having this week in Davos is exactly around that question in the international business council of WEF the last few days Brian Moynihan led a group of people that came up with a draft of some pilot questions and pilot statistics that we would endorse that all corporations would start putting together that we can start driving at a corporate level a micro level and have the same dialogue as well at the national level and Takanaka sensei I see you're wearing a wonderful green tie indicating where the world's going so well chosen green GDP yes before we turn to questions do you see areas where Japan could try and do more to measure the impact on the environment or rather the other way around the externalities okay I said I use the term we live in this sustainable and inclusive society in that sense we should consider other factors the GDP or the income for example the environmental issue is a very important issue this is now have been discussed for a long period and we now have some indicators to show the imputed cost of environment and additionally what the income gap income gap, income equality this also should be considered and at the same time nowadays in Japan most attention grabbing discussion is people's health health condition while Japan has the longest lifespan of people in the world this is not reflected in GDP for example so while ministry of economy trade industry commanding some excellent companies for health management etc etc so this should be considered very seriously from here on we are moving toward the ageing society ageing demography so well this would have a good strong impact on the medical cost etc etc so while in my position security and health and environment these are very very attention grabbing issue can I make a comment about this Japan is actually an example of a developed country in this theme of environmental impact it's actually much more positive than the others the energy usage of a per GDP per capita in Japan is about 60% of the US it's about 80% of Europe and it's partially because of city design urban design it's mass use of mass transit it's the subway systems it's the trains people live in smaller homes and so there's a whole footprint an environmental footprint that as we start thinking about other solutions to smart cities and environmentally friendly cities some places we can look to already or we can see practice in Japan well that's fascinating because one of the pole points about the forum and Davos is to try and get that international learnings from each other but on that note let's have some comments from the audience I know the number of you who'd like to speak let me quickly see I can see hands going up already let's start with you it would be courteous but not compulsory to identify yourself and since we have a number of hands already please keep any comments or questions very short absolutely hi my name is Abby I'm a global shaper from London and also the CEO of an early stage tech company thank you very much for the panel my question is mainly for Mariana but please feel free to input in Silicon Valley that government and the public sector is mainly a hindrance which of course is not true it would be great if you could maybe share some of your research and findings on how public spending, government spending has in fact been critical to commercializing many of the technologies that we use today thank you very much so how does statistics show that government is good so the phone that your friend there has is it a smart phone or a stupid phone is it dumb phone well everything that makes her a smart phone I'm sure it's smart it has a little apple thing on it and not stupid was in fact invested by public institutions internet, Siri, touchscreen display, GPS now what's interesting though is that again when these are publicly financed institutions we also don't really have a narrative to talk about this so in economics it's not just the value debate that is so interesting but the way we think of policy is just correcting something so we talk about it as correcting a market failure but actually what public institutions did in Silicon Valley was you know really co-create and co-shape that market and I think this really comes back to this issue of narrative I mean GDP isn't just a number there's narratives around it both in terms of how we talk about it in the media but where we think wealth creation comes from how it can be that I think it was Lloyd Blank Stein or Steen, the head of a Goldman Sachs said in 2009 Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive in the world and then they were bailed out by and billing by the US taxpayer you didn't hear the US taxpayer say we're the most productive in the world and a school teacher doesn't say we're the most productive in the world because in fact with public education when it's free we only know how to measure the cost the salaries not the output we're still not even measuring something as obvious as the value that a public education system provides so we literally can't even account for the productivity because we don't have a price for the output but the big thing about the public sector is that of course we need it but it's not just about kind of war time cold war kinds of technological spending coming back to the SDGs this notion that we really should have mission oriented kind of spending with real kind of public sector guidance of big directional pushes and then crowding in bottom up experimentation also by the business community or mainly to solve these big public goals that's a very different way to structure public private partnership and I would argue that what we need in WEF is to really also have metrics that define an interesting dynamics and biotic public private partnership going for a goal versus the kind of parasitic predator prey kind of public private partnerships we have for example in the health sector wow that's a very good point right question here and then another one next to you and then we'll come around this way thanks very much Jonathan Haskell from Imperial College I'm going to risk unpopularity by defending GDP if I may just for a second and if we just think back so what it is when we teach GDP to the students sorry I'm an economist you don't need to apologise for being an economist I think you're in the majority in the room probably we give them the basic intuition which I think is worth remembering which is if we've got an economy which is producing steel and producing cars the one thing we mustn't do is add the steel and the cars because of course the steel goes into the cars as an intermediate input so part of the reason why GDP is rather complicated and part of the reason why is that it's frustrating surely these big tech companies have got lots of information is they might have information on the various goods but that's not good enough what we need is we need the information to compute the value added on all the various intermediate chains if I could make that one point make a second point briefly if I may which is in the case of steel and cars we know what an intermediate input is the steel used up into the cars as Professor Takanaka rightly points out when we've got intangible inputs like R&D and software we need to deal with those now at that point it seems to me I just want to correct a misapprehension the national accountants who do GDP have been very energetic in attempting to capitalise intangibles it's the company accountants who refuse to count up intangibles so actually okay so it's all your fault Doug we're going to throw rotten tomatoes at GDP can we just keep in mind that it's got that basic intuition which is very helpful there's a bit of progress more to do but there has been some progress those are great points and before we have a response I'm going to take the next question as well because those are indeed very good points and then I'm going to ask Doug to defend corporate accountants and I'm Eric Brinyolff, Professor at MIT and I very much want to build on Jonathan's comments he's much too modest we certainly have a lot of academic curiosity and I'm going to support his view because he's too modest he actually was a person who's done so much work to bring intangibles into into the national accounting and like him I see a lot of virtues with GDP a lot of problems but there is a massive irony in the information age which is that we have less and less information about where real value comes from and that's not necessarily because GDP is flawed it was a 20th century construct great at counting numbers of cars produced or bushels of wheat it's really not designed for a digital age where so many of the things we get on our smartphones are free, the maps or the music or the Wikipedia anything that has a price of zero gets a weight of zero in GDP does that mean it has zero value? No but that's actually what GDP was designed to do and it's not a matter of us changing GDP to fix that Simon Cusnets pointed out at a number of interesting points that do not use GDP as a welfare measure a well-being measure but with the exception of the people here that's what a lot of journalists policy makers and economists are doing what we need is as was mentioned is a dashboard approach GDP is a measure of production let's keep it as a measure of production but we're interested in well-being we need a measure of well-being that is a fundamentally different concept that's how much benefit you get from each thing you pay zero for Wikipedia but you get $100 worth of benefit that's what we want to measure and we have a new measure called GDP the beef for benefit that can be parallel to GDP that captures those benefits and it uses some of the power of the digital age because we can do hundreds of thousands actually millions now of online choice experiments to assess how much people need to be paid to give up different goods and ultimately we will next year have a parallel set of numbers GDPB that focus on the benefits to go along with the production cost GDP and I think then we'll have a piece of the dashboard that Tanakasan and Mariana have all been talking about that's fascinating I'm going to keep going around there's two great contributions to the discussion I think one of the subtexts is if you want to understand this read Mariana's book and click on to GDP and Jonathan's book thank you Mariana and then you get a good picture of it but we had a couple of hands waving over here as well and I want to try and for fairness get one person behind me we haven't got much time left so if you can be short thank you, I'm Pierre Abar I'm with the trade union advisory committee so not an economist not an economist, union guy but one question was precisely isn't it an irony that we need more access to data and we need to tune our measurement but as we can see I can witness it in the discussion at the OECD that there is precisely less and less information because we are facing a kind of privatisation of data with more proprietary and a very very broad understanding of what business confidentiality is so a question is it's what the spectrum between perhaps legitimate business confidentiality requirements and the need for more granular and in the end access to data second question is I understand the idea of a dashboard having multiple indicators but from a political economy perspective what often happens is that decision makers they need one indicator not two, three, four so the question is should we move towards a dashboard or should we actually replace GDP with a composite, right I'm going to take one last question if I do want to be fair to the room make sure I get both right and left like I'm doing a disservice to your neck muscles no no no John Alexander I'm more a sort of social scientist than an economist that side of the softer side of social science should we say I'm really interested in this thing about measures of carriers of narrative and particularly with GDP what seems to happen as a sole measure is it then drives what all the other measures that are talked about are and so one of the things I'm particularly interested in is on the news what you see reported that the public face then becomes particularly the consumer confidence index is something that seems to be a disproportionate level of cover in a world where we are not just consumers and we're actually the identity construct of a consumer has there's a fairly good set of evidence that it's restrictive and maybe prioritises consumption as a strategy for governments but also that consumers tend to care less about the environment and one another I'm interested in whether there's a feeling that things like consumer confidence ought to be at the focus of more conversation rather than just GDP whether that sort of narrative function should be more of a discussion So narrative economics I think we have my calculation you have about a minute and a half each to deal with those massive existential questions Doug do you want to defend corporate accountants and private data What I will defend is first of all to start off I do think GDP is still critical we have a time series it's been around a long time and it is the foundation of so many decisions and it's also used by political world the financial world and the question we had here today is how can we make it better and I think we've heard that the second point I want to make is that there is a massive amount of data available to make it better or to find new measurements whether it's how we think about well-being how we think about the education system how we think about the healthcare system and I will tell you in our own case both in the ratings business or index business etc we incorporate that kind of information into choosing and making a decision about rating or choosing assets which be included in index it's not just a simple GDP metric and then finally we're in a world where data is now massive it's everywhere and every single organization is either struggling with or embracing a new strategy and I think is part of our discussion here everybody has to have a data strategy and how they're going to use new machine learning new approaches to managing large volume of data and we need to incorporate that back into how we think about GDP Mariana So that question which was fantastic actually all the questions were it really is about the ownership and the governance of the data and who it benefits and you know data or is benefiting from big data in ways that for example the welfare state hasn't yet and that's one of the biggest questions how can we actually reinvent the welfare state instead of decimating it as has been happening in many countries and really allow it for example what they're doing in Barcelona every time you click on city map you're generating data right data isn't static it's being generated now with people on their phones and they've been thinking about the new kinds of institutions for example public repository of the data which you know that would come from citizens engaging with phones across the city which then would benefit immediately public transport and the transport infrastructure and ideas about mobility but really kind of benefiting citizens but that just requires a whole other conversation which is about democracy and again the commons and the data commons and it's just that we shouldn't assume that because there's so much data out there and we just need to get access to it a quick thing on consumption just in case it wasn't clear it's not a good thing when you're growing just by buying things especially if wages haven't been rising that mean what's been happening in the UK and you can see this in the GDP data that's why I would defend GDP on so many levels we're just not using it for that what you can see in the UK is that private debt to disposable income is back at record levels that is what caused the crisis the FT but no other papers talking about it and you actually can see that with the GDP data and the blood growth fueled by private debt and that's the problem that's what causes bubbles to burst okay let me focus on one point dashboard or GDP it's a very challenging question but my personal proposal is the moderate amendment of GDP is needed especially considering the importance of intangible asset but my policy suggestion is sometimes criticized as too radical but I do not recommend radical amendment of GDP this time for the reason needs still you understand quite well we have so many difficulties in measuring intangible asset for example well how can get the real value real value, nominal value, real value well it's a very tough task but so we should consider the environmental issue and also we should consider intangible asset but some moderate amendment is needed at the same time well dashboard type of indicator we should focus more so GDP or dashboard this is both are needed my recommendation is very moderate steady amendment of GDP is needed and this kind of effort has been accumulated by many economists here and also finally dashboard type of indicator we should focus more from here well thank you well I must say I find this a fascinating discussion thank you to all three of you and also the audience and I take away three main points one is that clearly there are big challenges right now about how we look at the world around us and measure it and this has big policy implications what is encouraging is that there is now a debate about what is going on what is perhaps even more encouraging is that groups like the World Economic Forum are trying to bring people together to talk about this but it is not going to be easy to fix and easy to come to any kind of new path so there is a lot of work to be done so on that note I would like to finish by asking Zahid Yesahidi who is the managing director of the World Economic Forum to talk about what you are doing on this front and bring this discussion fascinating discussion to a close so give us the answers be careful last for you know you are at the 50th anniversary but 40 years ago our founder started the global dictatorship report which was a novel idea that let's take a look at the factors that feed into medium to long term productivity and looked at human capital looked at the institutions etc along the way we added things like our global gender gap index we added earlier this week our social mobility index looking at human capital in the future of jobs and the idea now is inspired by the work we've been able to do in the last six months with our international business council on having some convergence around ESG metrics could we try to help create that dashboard around GDP so today's conversation has been fascinating for anybody who would like to be involved in that effort over this coming year please do talk to me or my team that is here thank you so much so watch this space, thank you all