The UN has a whole system of national accounts that will pay much fuller attention to the effects of human economic activity on the natural environment. The gains in efficiency include some gains in environmental amenity. I want to avoid the word mismeasurement, because to mismeasure something suggests that you're actually measuring a different thing from what you think you're measuring. In our case, what we have done is decided not to measure certain things.
Robert Solow is 98 years old and a giant among economists. He tells Steve about cracking German codes in World War II, why it’s so hard to reduce inequality, and how his field lost its way.