A concept we’ve discussed a lot in our finance, economics, and accounting classes is sunk cost, and the “sunk cost fallacy” - throwing good money after bad. For example, you’ve invested R1m in a project and it’s losing money. You think if you put more money in, it’ll recoup the

initial- and additional capital, and eventually show a positive return. But sometimes all that happens is you go more and more into the negative and really you would have been better off pulling the plug earlier and suffering a smaller loss. Yes, it’s still a loss, but it’s less

than the loss you’ve subsequently created. The perfect analogy for the sunk cost fallacy is marriage. Long-term relationships in general but especially marriage. Hear me out. When relationships start to go bad, people want to save them for many reasons, one being that they’ve put

so much in. This is especially true of marriage - you’ve likely spent a ton of money on a wedding, made a promise in front of dozens/hundreds of people (on social media, that number goes further), and overall it’s been a huge investment, emotionally and otherwise. So you hold on,

thinking you can turn it around. Now, I’m not saying it isn’t worth trying to save a marriage. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but often the reason for wanting to try save it comes from much the same mindset as those who fall into the trap of the sunk cost fallacy. And then

when eventually you decide there’s no more that can be done and you call it a day you look back and realise that you spent years in something that only got worse, and in fact it would have been better to get out sooner than to spend more resources (emotional and otherwise) trying

to save it. It’s more complicated with kids, I guess, and this isn’t true of marriages that end relatively amicably and as a mutual decision. I’m talking about marriages that sour over years and years and become so unbearable that by the time they end there is so much resentment

and bitterness, much of which may have been avoided if the decision were made sooner. I brought marriage up as a sunk cost fallacy example and my accounting professor told me it’s his favourite one, but he tends not to mention it for fear of offending.

So I’m here to tell you that marriage is the perfect descriptor for the sunk cost fallacy. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.