CONCEPT
The Endowment Effect of Expertise
The intensified form of the behavioral-economic endowment effect as it applies to professional identity: practitioners overvalue the expertise they have accumulated because it is constitutive of who they are, not merely what they own.
The endowment effect of expertise is the intensified form of a well-documented cognitive bias. Ordinary objects acquire inflated value simply through possession; professional expertise acquires vastly inflated value because it is not merely possessed but constitutive of the practitioner's identity, social relationships, economic livelihood, and daily experience of competence. When AI renders this expertise less valuable, practitioners experience a loss that is not merely economic but ontological—they are losing a part of themselves, not just a market advantage. The intensity of this loss is systematically underestimated by commentators who have not experienced it, and the resistance it produces should not be dismissed as irrational attachment to obsolete skills.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism operates by the same principle as the classical endowment effect documented in behavioral economics. A coffee mug that a person would not pay five dollars to acquire becomes worth ten dollars the moment they own it. But