While deliberating about the Walkman, Sendhil realized how misleading this reasoning was. He was already eating all the burritos he wanted. Suppose he chose not to buy the Walkman. He would not go out and eat seventy-eight more burritos. He was not trading off the Walkman against seventy-eight burritos. For this thinking to work, he needed to know where the money saved would be spent. It certainly would not have gone to bean burritos, any more than refraining from buying something would send you on vacation to the Bahamas. Making the trade-off concrete requires tracing the money that was saved
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