 Some of the things that are good for GDP but terrible for us are for example hurricanes and other natural disasters, wars, drug traffic, cybercrime. Many of those things require police services or other dedicated services in order to protect and this is what makes GDP go up. It measures all the activity that goes on in the economy in a single year. You can measure it either by adding up everything people spend, all of the incomes or all of the output in the economy like measuring the height of a mountain or the depth of a river but it's not a natural object at all. It's an analytical construct but of course that's the kind of arbitrary definition and lots of judgments are involved and I think it would be really helpful if people could get their head around the uncertainty that's involved in measuring GDP. The term dates back to the Second World War when the need was to understand what resources the war economy needed and what consumption sacrifices citizens were going to have to make to enable that to happen so a whole set of national statistics now dates from the 1940s. It leaves out some important things it leaves out the environmental cost of economic growth and it leaves out the value of unpaid work that people do in the home and it also doesn't pay any attention to the national balance sheet if you like to the assets that we use to enjoy today's income and consumption so if we really care about sustainability a very important thing is to start measuring all of those assets properly as well. It's about equal opportunities for women and it's about having a publicly financed system of education and of health care which also makes services accessible. I believe that your history and your culture does affect how society is run. All countries can work towards more inclusiveness with understanding how this country is functioning. I think we have been benefited by a quite poor society newly becoming more rich but being rich after we've established strong institutions. One of the things we have is a large NGO sector with a lot of voluntary work which is where most of the Norwegians live their lives in activity with others and I think that makes very close bonds between people. There's a really great appetite at the moment to go beyond GDP and get a better understanding of economic progress. This is partly being driven by all the digital change that we see happening in the economy and we need to track what that's doing which is both you know very good because of all the innovations that we're able to use but somewhat worrying if it means that there's going to be disruption to jobs as well so we certainly want to track that and I think that's the project for the next few years for researchers and policymakers to have that conversation about we want to go beyond GDP for a better measure of economic progress but what are we going to go to?