If your worldview places a premium on human freedom and growth, you’ll regard the inhumanity of bureaucracy as intolerable and feel compelled to act. If, on the other hand, you regard human beings as factors of production, you’ll make excuses for bureaucracy and be content with minor reforms.

I think we can, however, assert that our capacity for ‘good’ is of a higher order than our capacity for ‘bad’ and, therefore, merits our focus. I say ‘higher order’ because the science of the brain suggests that only the ‘good’ feeds human development. The ‘bad’ limits, even derails, human development. For example, when the human is born, the brain arrives not fully formed and needs further ‘processing’. That ‘processing’, as it turns out, is a form of the ‘good’. Key in this is sustained generative attention supported by the other components of a thinking environment.

Kelvin’s approach leads directly to the modern curse of bogus quantification. The United Nations produces an index of human development (HDI; see Figure 8), under which countries are ranked from Iceland (at the top) to Sierra Leone (at the bottom). The high-level objective of human development is translated into three goals or states: longevity, educational standards and gross domestic product (GDP). The longevity measure, for example, takes life expectancy at birth (L) and then calculates (L-25)/60, so that if life expectancy is 82 years the score is 0.95.

My critique of GDP measurement in practice relates to its inability to report sufficiently accurately what it is intended to measure: the value of economic output. And pronouncements based on such data about long-run trends in income or the rate of increase of productivity should be taken with a grain of salt – or several. When pundits fret over whether the latest figure for GDP growth is an annual rate of 1.8 per cent or 1.9 per cent, they are fussing over differences that are insignificant in relation to the fundamental and inescapable uncertainties in the data they are citing.

As I worked on this book, I puzzled where core values fit into the research findings. To be clear, there is no single unified set of core values across all the people in this study. That said, each person developed a set of values somewhere along the way, some more explicitly than others. These values might have come from family, or mentors, or teachers, or military service, or the ethics of their field, or the social milieu in which they lived, or their faith traditions, or reading and reflection, or personal experience, or some combination. I came to see that living to a set of core values is a choice, a personal responsibility of the highest order.