Newmark's Door

Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz tries to make a point using economics and gets it half right.

He quotes President Bush and ex-president Clinton to the effect that U.S. troops should stay in Iraq until the job is finished because we need to honor our dead. Professor Schwartz correctly notes that since the dead are unchangeably dead, they are a sunk cost. And economists teach that sunk costs should be ignored in making decisions.

But this just points up another thing economists teach: people are often imprecise when they talk. What Bush and Clinton mean is not that we should take account of the sunk cost of the current dead, but that we should consider the consequences of abandoning the mission on future behavior. We will almost certainly ask military personnel again to risk death. If we don't keep faith now, we will be dishonoring future deaths, with grave consequences. And that's not a sunk cost.