Opportunity cost
|
Opportunity cost
/ˌɒpəˈtjuːnɪti kɒst/ (n.)
The potential advantages one forgoes when choosing one alternative over another.
The JC is fomenting a theory that somewhere the notion of the opportunity cost has been lost to modern discourse. The idea that you can be this or that, or neither, but taking any of these options and enjoying its fruits means forgoing the alternatives, and their fruits, is one that appears not to have occurred to those under the age of thirty.
This article is in grave danger of descending into a grumpy middle-aged tract, but starts with the news, in August 2021, that one in five weddings now involves a prenuptial agreement. Now the JC has no particular axe to grind about marriage — by all means, get married or don’t; see if I care — but more to the concept of what marriage is meant to be, at the outset: a permanent merger of social and economic interests. It may be that, along life’s rocky road, things don’t work out, but the aspiration to permanence must at least justify some meaningful commitment: the combination of resources for the intended betterment of all. That one or other party is disproportionately wealthy, or poor, one should deal with in one’s due dilly — aka “courtship” in the old days — before making the decision to marry. That decision is not meant to be one taken lightly. It is meant to be a life commitment — or sentence, depending on how you look at it.
To look at it this way is the regard a prenuptial agreement as a desire to have one’s cake and eat it too. It is to refrain from putting your skin in the game.[1] to refrain from drilling the holes in your longboats to stop your men running away.[2]
Analysts at the Vampire Squid
You want to learn how to jam your stent into anything that smells of money on a nine to five?
The enlightenment cancelling the enlightenment
Kicking the ladder is one thing: Proposing to erasie the history altogether quite another
See also
References
- ↑ Rather, in this regard, like appointing a process agent: most metaphors don’t bear close examination.
- ↑ As, allegedly, did William the Conqueror upon making landfall at Pevensey. This knowledge has been with me since I was about five, and my authority for it is the Ladybird book about William the Conqueror, and as a result it might be entirely false. But it is a good metaphor.