Albert Wenger

I don't think we need to rely on just private prices.

I think some of the most famous prices in history were public prices.

Well, there's a wonderful book by Dana Sobel called Longitude, and it's about the longitude price, which the British crown granted for keeping proper time at sea so that you could determine not just latitude, which you can easily get from the sun, but longitude, which was a lot harder to get.

Yeah, to me, that's a fairly easy one.

I think I would give a prize for the most efficient, and this would be precisely defined, biochar production.

So from net new biomass.

No, that's great.

It was always a bad measure, but for a long time it was sort of the best measure that we had.

It was a bad measure historically because it doesn't measure negative externalities.

So if I, you know, basically if I sell cigarettes and cause cancer, the cigarettes come positive in the GDP and then your cancer treatment also comes positive in the GDP.

So the negative externalities were always a problem.

Now we have massive positive externalities and those are also not counted.

So when I make a lot of knowledge available for free and people stop selling Encyclopedia Britannica or stop selling certain types of books, but everybody can now read it for free, I'm kind of shrinking GDP because it measures the production side and not the consumption side.

What economists call consumer surplus, meaning the benefit I get from

now being able to go on Wikipedia isn't captured anywhere there.

So I very much think that we need to move away from

just become a kind of a measure that is completely outdated now that so much of what we can do with digital technology is explicitly about making things either free or free at the margin and creating massive amounts of consumer surplus.

It's not that easy to come up with good measures, to be clear, as to what to substitute.

But I do think that measuring things like

people's basic life satisfaction, continuing to measure population health.