Reputational capital depreciates faster than financial capital, but almost no one tracks it with the same rigor. The 18th-century Neapolitan jurist Giambattista Vico noticed something that modern game theory would later formalize: human institutions are governed not by fixed rules but by *senso comune* — shared practical sense — which means that once a participant's reputation for reliability erodes in a community's felt understanding, no contractual mechanism can fully restore it. The loss isn't recorded on a balance sheet, which is exactly why people chronically underinvest in the behaviors that maintain it. In economic terms, reputation is a non-excludable asset whose returns are diffuse and whose costs of depletion are invisible until the credit line closes. The practical implication for anyone who operates in adversarial rooms: the moment you win an argument by being technically right but relationally careless, you've spent down an asset that will compound against you in the next negotiation, the next jury selection, the next vote — because the other parties update their model of you before you've noticed they've done it.

Think of the last time you were technically correct in a high-stakes exchange. What did the other party's behavior signal in the following interaction — and did you register it as feedback about how they'd revised their model of you?

Drawing from Neapolitan Historical Philosophy / Viconian Epistemology — Giambattista Vico (New Science / Scienza Nuova, 1725)