When you’re budgeting resources, conflicts with adversaries are a little different than other sorts of categories of expense, which might be largely determined by your own consumption habits or, if put at risk by unexpected changes in nature or in the economy, don’t change in a way to actively thwart us, are more or less random. When in a conflict, you’re always going to want to be conservative in estimating the resources you need, which is something obvious in any book on military logistics, and being conservative requires overestimating what your opponent can do, and underestimating how far your current resources will actually go. If you weren’t conservative, you could put more resources towards other things (guns vs butter debates) but being conservative is probably more evolutionarily fit than being more accurate in that estimation, as the conservative planner will be more prepared in unexpected situations.
When you’re budgeting resources, conflicts with adversaries are a little different than other sorts of categories of expense, which might be largely determined by your own consumption habits or, if put at risk by unexpected changes in nature or in the economy, don’t change in a way to actively thwart us, are more or less random. When in a conflict, you’re always going to want to be conservative in estimating the resources you need, which is something obvious in any book on military logistics, and being conservative requires overestimating what your opponent can do, and underestimating how far your current resources will actually go. If you weren’t conservative, you could put more resources towards other things (guns vs butter debates) but being conservative is probably more evolutionarily fit than being more accurate in that estimation, as the conservative planner will be more prepared in unexpected situations.
I think your point is roughly what I thought, viz.: isn’t this just loss aversion?