Argument from Waste: "We've Come Too Far to Stop Now"

In 1976, the British and French governments were facing a clear-eyed choice about Concorde. The supersonic passenger jet had already consumed staggering sums of public money — some estimates put total development costs at over £1 billion in 1970s sterling — and operational economics made it clear the aircraft would never be commercially profitable. The rational forward-looking decision was to cut losses. Instead, the governments continued to operate Concorde for another 27 years, partly because cancellation would have meant "all that money was wasted." The economists who documented this pattern named it after the aircraft: the Concorde fallacy. But in argumentation theory, it has a different name — and a more nuanced analysis.

The Argumentation Scheme

The argument from waste is Douglas Walton's formal treatment of what behavioural economists call the sunk cost fallacy. In Walton's formulation (1992, 2002), the scheme runs:

If we stop doing A, then the resources already invested in A will be wasted.
Wasting resources is bad.
Therefore, we should continue doing A.

At first glance, this looks like a practical argument (practical reasoning), but with a crucial difference: the justification for continuing points backward to what has already been spent, rather than forward to what can still be achieved. And that backward-looking structure is precisely what makes the argument potentially fallacious.

Walton's analysis reaches a significant and often overlooked conclusion: the argument from waste is not always fallacious. In some contexts, it is a legitimate and rational consideration. Determining when it is which requires engaging with the scheme's critical questions.

The Sunk Cost Problem

In economics, sunk costs are costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. The classic rational-choice rule is: sunk costs are irrelevant to future decisions. The only things that should determine whether to continue project P are the expected future benefits of continuing versus the expected future costs — not what has already been spent. What is gone is gone. The question is only what comes next.

This is the foundation of the sunk cost fallacy: allowing the psychology of prior investment to distort future decisions. Once you have paid £50 for a concert ticket that turns out to be for a band you no longer enjoy, the rational choice is to evaluate whether attending is worth your time and energy on that evening. The £50 is spent either way. But most people experience the investment as a reason to attend — and experience the decision to stay home as "wasting the ticket money" — even though the money is already gone in either scenario.

Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory provides the psychological mechanism: losses are felt roughly twice as strongly as equivalent gains. The prospect of "wasting" prior investment triggers loss aversion, which then drives irrational commitment to failing courses of action. In organisational contexts, this is amplified by self-justification dynamics: leaders who authorised an investment are motivated to demonstrate that their original decision was correct, which means continuing to fund the project provides psychological vindication even as it destroys objective value.

When Quitting IS the Smart Move

The most important practical implication of understanding the argument from waste is learning to recognise when continuation is not rational persistence but rationalised escalation. The history of large institutional projects is full of cases where the argument from waste sustained decisions that destroyed far more value than they preserved.

The Vietnam War is the most studied example. As American troop deaths mounted and the military situation failed to improve, successive administrations found themselves trapped by the argument from waste: the lives and treasure already spent made withdrawal feel like "admitting defeat" and "dishonoring the sacrifice." The result was escalation — more deaths, more expenditure — in the service of a goal that was never clearly defined and never achievable. In retrospect, most analysts agree that earlier withdrawal, even at the cost of admitting failure, would have been far less costly than the eventual outcome.

At the project level, NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket programme has been critiqued on similar grounds: enormous sunk costs in legacy shuttle-derived technology have been used to justify continued investment even as commercial alternatives (SpaceX, ULA) have demonstrated dramatically lower costs for equivalent or greater capability. The argument "we've invested too much to stop" functions not as a reason to complete a valuable project but as protection against accountability for earlier decisions.

The rational approach when evaluating whether to continue any project or commitment is to perform a prospective analysis: ignore sunk costs entirely, and ask only: "Given where we are now, does continuing generate more value than stopping?" If the answer is no — if the expected future return is lower than the expected future cost — then stopping is rational, regardless of how much has already been spent.

When the Argument from Waste Is Not Fallacious

Walton's analysis identifies circumstances in which the argument from waste can constitute genuine practical reasoning rather than a fallacy. The key variable is whether the prior investment has created options or commitments that would be destroyed by stopping, and whether those options or commitments have genuine prospective value.

Consider a university student halfway through a four-year degree programme. From a strict sunk-cost perspective, the two years already completed should be irrelevant to the decision whether to continue. But the prior investment has created something with prospective value: proximity to a credential that will have concrete future benefits. The cost of stopping is not just the psychological loss of prior investment — it is the concrete prospective loss of half a completed degree that is worth much less than a completed one. In this context, "I've come this far" is not purely a sunk cost argument. It is an argument about the prospective value of completing something that has already been substantially built.

A more systematic way to evaluate this: the argument from waste is stronger when:

• The investment has created a partially completed asset with genuine prospective value (a half-built building, a half-completed study, a relationship at a formative stage).
• The marginal cost of completion is significantly lower than the cost of starting the equivalent project from scratch.
• Abandonment would impose signalling costs — reputational damage, breach of contract, loss of institutional trust — that have genuine prospective consequences.
• The prior investment has generated knowledge or capabilities that are only fully valuable if the project is completed.

Escalating Commitment and Organisational Traps

Barry Staw's foundational research on "escalating commitment" (1976) demonstrated experimentally that people invested more resources in failing courses of action precisely when they were responsible for the original decision — suggesting that self-justification, not rational calculation, was driving the escalation. Subsequent research has confirmed that this effect is amplified in hierarchical organisations, where the person who authorised the original investment is also the person who controls the continuation decision.

The organisational antidote is structural: separate the person who evaluates whether to continue from the person who originally committed. External review panels, "red team" audits, and explicit stage-gate processes with objective continuation criteria are all attempts to reduce the self-justification dynamic that turns the argument from waste from a rhetorical device into an institutional pathology.

The Rhetorical Form in Everyday Life

The argument from waste appears constantly in everyday contexts, often in emotionally compelling forms:

• "I've been in this relationship for five years — I can't just give up now."
• "We've already renovated three rooms — we might as well do the fourth."
• "I've read 200 pages of this book — I'll finish it even though I'm not enjoying it."
• "We've been at war for three years — our soldiers didn't die for nothing."

In each case, the argument from waste is pulling against a prospective evaluation of whether to continue. Sometimes the prospective evaluation supports continuing anyway — the relationship has genuine future potential, the fourth renovation is genuinely necessary, the book gets better. In those cases, the argument from waste and the prospective analysis converge. The danger arises when they diverge — when the prospective analysis clearly favours stopping, but the psychology of prior investment overrides it.

Sources & Further Reading

• Walton, Douglas. "The Sunk Costs Fallacy or Argument from Waste." Argumentation 16 (2002): 473–503. Springer
• Staw, Barry M. "Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action." Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16, no. 1 (1976): 27–44.
• Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk." Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–291.
• Arkes, Hal R., and Catherine Blumer. "The Psychology of Sunk Cost." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 35 (1985): 124–140.
• Wikipedia: Sunk cost, Escalation of commitment
• See also: Sunk Cost Fallacy, Loss Aversion, Practical Reasoning, Status Quo Bias, Action Bias