Understating costs forces legislators into a sunk-cost trap
Evidence
But what if you didn’t tell the officials how much the projects would cost? What if you let the legislators know about only a fraction of what you knew would be the projects’ ultimate expense? … Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you had spent it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. How could they? If they refused to give you the rest of the money, what they had given you would be wasted, and that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been misled, that would mean that they hadn’t investigated the projects thoroughly, and had therefore been derelict in their own duty. The possibilities for a polite but effective form of political blackmail were endless. Once a Legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it. The stakes you drove should be thin-pointed—wedge-shaped, in fact—on the end. Once you got the end of the wedge for a project into the public treasury, it would be easy to hammer in the rest. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 964
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that legislators cannot admit they were misled because that would indict their own dereliction is a subtle mechanism of political power worth sitting with.
- XREF: connects to: Sunk-cost pressure traps legislators who authorized spending they cannot inspect — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 989; Underestimating project costs forces legislatures to keep funding them — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 963
Broader Connections
- Underestimating project costs forces legislatures to keep funding them
#corroborates(0.95) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 963 - Sunk-cost pressure traps legislators who authorized spending they cannot inspect
#expands(0.93) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 989