But here’s the salient point: poker players and stock investors who don’t learn to control their instinctive deference to sunk costs go broke. They lose all their money and can’t play poker or invest in stocks anymore. By contrast, the average person whose sunk costs have made him so irrationally stubborn that he has effectively reached intellectual bankruptcy just trundles right along, mostly, sustained by habits and social structures that prevent him from paying the full price for his error.
