You paid a fortune for a non-refundable ticket, the show is awful within twenty minutes, and you sit through three more hours anyway because you already paid. This episode explains why. It starts with the economic baseline: the distinction between sunk and prospective costs, the bygones principle, and a worked factory example where 30 million dollars already spent should be ignored and the only question is whether spending 70 million more is worth the asset you get back.

The hosts then show how that logic collapses in practice, from the Concorde supersonic jet that Britain and France kept funding after it was clearly a commercial disaster, to nuclear plants utilities refused to abandon in the 1970s and 80s, to research showing people stay in failing relationships because of time already invested. They distinguish genuine sunk cost errors fr ...