Volume 4 · The Ledger and the Loom · Essay 272
Switch Cost Effect
Switch Cost Effect is one of those quiet regularities of human life — unnoticed like ceiling fans, until someone points upward.
This is one of those findings that improves manners. Once you know it, you judge others more gently, because you can see the machinery moving inside yourself first.
What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.
Consider the chit fund in a small town. It survives not on contracts but on the shame of defaulting before neighbours. Reputation is the oldest collateral in India.
Money is a good clerk and a terrible master; the arrangement is entirely up to us. You will meet this idea again this week, wearing different clothes. Now you will recognise it.