The true cost of any choice is the best alternative it displaces.
Wieser's term. Its practical difficulty is that the displaced alternative is counterfactual and therefore invisible, which is why organisations systematically undercount it.
In practice
- A team that takes a low-value project has not lost money on it; it has lost the high-value project it could not staff.
- A council that spends four months on a consultation has spent four months not doing the thing it consulted about.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Economics & Incentives
- Essay
- Rules for choosing, and the paradoxes that humbled the theory