Value capture happens when your environment presents you with simplified versions of your values, and those simple versions come to dominate your practical reasoning. Value capture offers you a quick shortcut—an opportunity to take on prefabricated values. You do not have to go through the painful process of value deliberation if you can get your values off the shelf.

I want to focus on one particularly clear, and quite common, form of value capture: when an institution presents you with some metric, and then you internalize that metric.

I mean to exclude here from the category of value capture those cases where we use external values as proxies and heuristics under full reflective control—when we select, monitor, and adapt those heuristics in the light of our own richer values.

… we will flourish when we have the capacity to adjust and tailor our values in light of our rich experience of the world living under them. When we tailor our values to ourselves in light of those rich experiences, then our values will be better fit to promote our flourishing, as the very specific people we are.