to an extremely expensive building project that fails to deliver on its function or becomes very costly to maintain. Examples include prestigious but uneconomic infrastructure projects such as airports, dams, bridges, shopping malls and football stadiums. The American Oakland Athletics baseball team has used a white elephant as a symbol and usually its main or alternate logo since 1902, originally in sarcastic defiance of John McGraw's 1902 characterization of the new team as a "white elephant". The Dubai Central airport has also been named a white elephant. In Singapore, paper cutouts of white elephants were placed next to the completed but unopened Buangkok MRT station in 2005, leading to a police investigation. The term has also been applied to outdated or underperforming military projects like the U.S. Navy's Alaska-class cruiser. In Austria, the term "white elephant" means workers who have little or no use, but are not terminable. See also White elephant gift exchange Hills Like White Elephants Bridge to nowhere Escalation of commitment (sunk cost fallacy) Pork barrel Abul-Abbas References Further reading Contains a chapter on the white elephant in Southeast Asia. Contains a long chapter on how Burmese generals tried to use the white elephant to consolidate power, also looks at the cosmological origins of the animal. External links English-language idioms Metaphors referring to elephants Public choice theory