Quotes About Trade-offs

Following one good to the end may be catastrophic, not because it isn't a good, but because there are others which can't be sacrificed without evil.

Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics.

Happy is measuring your life against the options and not wanting to change it. It's getting the best of a series of bargains, bad or otherwise.

Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.

There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.

The myth is that women and their families don't have to make trade-offs to have an 'extreme career'; they absolutely do. How you prioritize your life and career is your choice. Once you make a decision, stick to it; don't always second-guess yourself.

Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen.

when you're very competitive, you get good at the thing you're competing with people on. But it comes at the expense of losing out on many other things.

1) To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. 2) People's IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

You cannot do only one thing.

Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.

No matter what ya do to help somebody, it'll hurt somebody else.

I find that a high in one area of my life often produces a low in another

Even the best needles are not sharp at both ends.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants each serving a town of 60,000 people. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?

Government can't give us anything without depriving us of something else.

I tell my micro students everything I teach them is important, but the truth is that some things are more useful than others, and opportunity cost is near the top.

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

About the only useful thing my economics degree taught me was that, in all decisions in life, you have to do a cost-benefit analysis.

In many cases, water stress is more about politics, economics, behaviour and governance than absolute water scarcity. Better planning is needed, to allocate water where societal need is greatest, and to allow trade-offs between alternative uses.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

At most large companies, what is locally optimal for you is very frequently not what is globally optimal for the company.

I can be fat or I can smoke. I can't be both." They