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For almost five centuries, the seas off the Canadian island of Newfoundland

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constituted the richest fishing grounds in the world.

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But in 1992, the cod disappeared almost overnight as a result of decades of overfishing.

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The region was devastated by the collapse of the fishing industry.

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In spite of $26 billion in government aid,

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70,000 people have left the province in the past decade,

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and cod stocks show no sign of recovering.

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One of the lessons of the cod collapse is that traditional ways of measuring wealth,

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such as gross domestic product, can be misleading.

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GDP is meaningless if it's based upon a non-sustainable resource,

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because it's not a measure of well-being, it's a measure of using wealth,

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of consuming wealth that you had,

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as opposed to earning income from your capital assets.

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GDP is the most well-known measure of economic performance in the world.

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However, GDP measures all economic activity,

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fighting crime, natural disasters, and environmental depletion,

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whether or not it contributes to an individual's well-being or a community's progress.

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GDP also doesn't show how a nation's wealth is distributed.

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Britain's economy has grown faster than most European countries over the last decade,

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but this growth has done little to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

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This is the City of London, the world's leading international business and financial center.

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It's the richest region in Europe, and many of the people who work here are staggeringly wealthy.

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Yet, just over a kilometer from the city, many people live in poverty.

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In the borough of Bethnal Green, almost half the children live in families

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where at least one parent is out of work.

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In a society where only a few people get very, very rich,

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and the rest is very, very poor, it's not very much sustainable in the long run.

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The paradox is that although Western countries have got immeasurably wealthier over the last 50 years,

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many people don't feel richer, and those that have made it are not necessarily happier.

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But it's only grime for the richer. It's not grime for the ordinary working class person. It's getting worse.

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Having money could cause you more problems.

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Obviously, it helps an awful lot, but I don't think it does make you happy.

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Economics professor Lord Richard Layard has written a best-selling book called Happiness.

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People will tell you that they feel their life is increasingly difficult and stressful,

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so it's obvious that we've got a kind of false god

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if we're saying that almost anything is justified if it produces an increase in GDP.

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GDP is a good way of measuring production, but there's an increasing consensus

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that new tools are needed for calculating progress, well-being, and our ecological footprint on the planet.

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The European Commission, along with its partners,

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is working on a new set of indices that seeks to go beyond GDP

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to take into account social, environmental, and economic progress.

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More and more people are coming to the conclusion that it's not just the quantity of growth that's important,

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but also its quality.

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The challenge now is to develop a means of measuring sustainable progress

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that's robust enough for decision-makers and clear enough for the general public.