The Beautiful Mistake
In 1962, Britain and France signed a treaty to build a supersonic jet together. They split the cost down the middle and called it Concorde.
By the mid-1960s, the British government already knew the truth. Privately, officials regarded it as a commercial disaster that should never have been started. They knew it would never recoup its development costs. The numbers were not close. The numbers were a horror.
And yet the money kept flowing. For more than a decade.
Here is the detail the world walks past: the 1962 treaty had no exit clause. No break. No off-ramp. Pulling out carried heavy cancellation penalties, so two governments who both wanted to stop were legally welded to a project they both believed was a mistake. The plane finally entered service on 21 January 1976. By then the programme had cost somewhere between 1.5 and 2.1 billion pounds, many times the original estimate of 70 million. Twenty aircraft were ever built. The development money was never recovered.
Call it the Concorde fallacy. The name is real. The biologist Richard Dawkins and his student Tamsin Carlisle coined it in 1976, arguing that it is a mistake to pour more into something simply because you have already poured so much in. Economists have their own word for the same trap: the sunk cost effect. You keep going not because the future is bright, but because the past was expensive.
This is the thing about sunk costs. They feel like a reason. They are a receipt.
The money is gone. The years are gone. The treaty you signed when you were optimistic is gone. None of it can vote on tomorrow. The only honest question is the one the past hates: starting from right now, with nothing already spent, would you choose this?
If the answer is no, the spending so far is not an argument to continue. It is the evidence to stop.
Concorde was beautiful. It flew until 2003. But two of the smartest governments on earth funded a plane they did not believe in, for over a decade, because quitting felt like admitting the receipts were worthless. The receipts were already worthless. That was never the question.
You are running a Concorde somewhere. A project, a job, a relationship, a strategy you would never start today but cannot stop because of everything you have already poured in.
The treaty you signed with your past self has no exit clause. Write one.