Gross domestic product

Some years ago I read an interesting bit about how gross domestic product as a measure of value added by society is computed. It said, if we had a disaster such as an oil spill, and spent a lot of money in cleaning up the mess, this would boost the GDP. Ironic. May be when we spend money on war, fighting crime, drugs, etc also the GDP goes up. Is there any error in this? Are there any metrics where we measure true developmental value addition and avoidable / wasteful value addition?

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