Theft at the Public Till
The concept of "sunk costs are truly sunk" may be a correct rule for the maximization of monetary profits, but it is thus not an appropriate general principle of decision making. We do not treat our past commitments to others as of no account except insofar as they affect our future returns, as when breaking a commitment may affect others' trust in us and hence our ability to achieve other future benefits; and we do not treat the past efforts we have devoted to ongoing projects of work or of life as of no account (ex- cept insofar as this makes their continuance more likely to bring benefits than other freshly started projects would). Such projects help to define our sense of ourselves and of our lives. The standard conclusion in the economic literature that rational de- cision makers should ignore sunk costs because bygones are bygones and are not subject to retrospective modification by current acts is quite right if interpreted with care. But sunk costs do matter before they are incurred; in fact, they can make an enormous difference. They can even restore a role to costs sunk in the past if the decision maker can learn something about the future from the history of costs sunk earlier. For example, a country that expropriates foreign investments, believing that foreigners can no longer do anything about them, is very likely to find those foreigners much more reluctant to sink capital in that country there- after. The dependence of current and future cost-sinking decisions on the experience of the past is particularly important in a continuing process in which such outlays are required at regular intervals. There, sunk costs and the returns to them clearly do matter for current and future decisions, and cannot be left out of account in a rational decision process. The ability to model reality in multiple modes-with text, image, conver- sation, sculpture, and so on-is an indispensable part of creativity and collab- oration. Architects, graphic designers, industrial designers, and scientists can't trust alphanumeric arrays to capture the ideas and images crystallizing in their minds. The popular influence of architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Michael Graves can be as much attributed to their facility as visual art- ists as the buildings they've made. While Mao said that "Power grows from the barrel of a gun," in architecture and design, influence grows from the
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