====== Sunk Costs ======

**Rule:**\\
Before abandoning some effort already underway, consider how much resources (time, money, 
political capital) you have already invested.

**Aphorisms:**\\
Don't change horses in the middle of the stream.\\
[[wp>There ain't no such thing as a free lunch]].
  
See [[wp>Sunk costs]] for the economic critique of this rule.  Your decision to continue a course of action should only depend on the current [[analysis:economics:value:0main]] of doing so, and not on how much you have invested.  Yet in a world that is [[analysis:physical:prediction_is_intractable | pathologically unpredictable]], //nobody knows// what the future value will be (least of all economists.) Valuable results usually only come from effort --- though our efforts may be wasted, given that we cannot know the true value, we use the amount we have invested as a proxy.

{{tag>bias unpredictability economics}}