Quotes About Trade-offs

Look, it can be fast, good, or cheap. You can have any two but never all three." "Why?" "It's the law of the universe.

What we gain in the straightaways, we lose in the roundabouts. That's the way the universe works. We've just got to fool it somehow.

There's a false notion that success is a zero sum game. To win in our careers we have to give up family. To work hard we have to sacrifice sleep. To accomplish we must take (or borrow or steal) from somewhere else in our lives. It's just not the case.

Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics.

One man's wage rise is another man's price increase.

Nothing is pure and entire of a piece. All advantages are attended with disadvantages. A universal compensation prevails in all conditions of being and existence.

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

We all only have a certain amount of money and that means yes, we have to make choices and sometimes those choices mean we don't get what we want.

Here are the choices I dont want to make: between paying additional fuel costs and flying and steaming less; between paying additional fuel costs and building fewer ships and planes.

So in all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging.

Giving up one activity does not guarantee you will take up a more worthy substitute.

It is not possible to spend on one thing and then not have consequences on something else.

those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere

His idea is that if we were to optimize at every step in life, then it would cost us an infinite amount of time and energy. Accordingly

In a system, the sacrifices of some units—fragile units, that is, or people—are often necessary for the well-being of other units or the whole.

He would be forced to act as a satisficer instead of a maximizer

This reasoning shows that sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call "negative utility.

the potential costs are much worse than the cumulative gains.

We are, after all, homo economicus .

Obviously good economics is not always good politics.

We have been suckered into believing that, because there are more men at the top than women at the top, that this is a result of discrimination against women. That's been the misconception. It's all about trade-offs. You earn more money, you usually sacrifice something at home.

La economía trata de quién consigue qué y por qué. En

La economía tiene que ver con la decisión de Yang Li.

If you desire one thing for so long, it's a given that you'll miss other things along the way. That's how it is… that's life.