Marc in KS has a Diary up, discussing the
Sunk Loss Effect:
This is the idea that once you've invested a significant amount in something, that past investment provides a psychological justification for continued investment. The irrational part of it is the fact that the initial investment is already gone, and should play no role in deciding whether or not to continue to invest. . . .
So, throwing good money after bad is a profoundly irrational action, and in the case of this war, a profoundly immoral one: we are justifying continued death by appeal to past deaths, deaths that we cannot by any future action render meaningful. If this were a purely economic question, then the business decision to continue to invest in a loser might lie in some prospects for a turnaround -- we might be able to get the money back, if things change.
But we can't get back dead soldiers and marines. We just can't. So why do we do this? Why do we persist in such irrational behavior?
One of two reasons for this is that:
People who are personally responsible for making the decisions that led to the loss are reluctant to admit the mistake and are likely to continue to invest in the (even completely vain) hope that things will somehow turn around. This happens for two reasons:
- 1 We are trained, from a very early age, to complete what we begin.
- 2 We are heavily invested in the protection of our self-esteem, either by not admitting error to self, or an attempting to justify the prior decision to others.
Possible ways out? Three out of four things Marc suggests things are:
- The most obvious and ineluctable consequence of not stopping is that at some point we will get fed up enough with the continued investment and will stop -- or we will run out of young men and women and will be forced to stop. But we lost 54,000 young men in Vietnam before we decided that we couldn't sustain it. This is sobering, very sobering. It doesn't seem like a viable strategy for stopping.
- Get rid of the person responsible. In cases where an institution has made bad investments, change of course occurred most often when the investment manager responsible was no longer with the company. I think that suggests that we should, as quickly as possible, get rid of Bush and any hint of neo-con thinkers.
- Emphasizing the future costs. Sunk-cost effects are very sensitive to framing, and research has showed that if the continued costs are made more salient, people pay less attention to the sunk costs. We need to be very vocal about the soldiers and marines, their families, and the Iraqi people, all of whom are going to continue to suffer as continue stuck down in this idiotic abomination of a war.
Thus is validated the Message: The way out of Iraq leads through impeachment.
1 comment:
T. Christian Miller, Marshall Plan, Minus the Plan makes this point on Bush's effort to invoke the neo-Marshall Plan for Iraq:
The reasons for the failure are well known and maddeningly circular. First, too few troops meant that the U.S. military was unable to provide the security needed. The biggest difference between postwar Japan and Germany and postwar Iraq is the word "post." Despite Bush's assurance that "major combat" is over in Iraq, the war never really ended.
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