Quotes About Trade-offs

Better a live dog than a dead lion.

It would be too glib, not a hundred per cent true, to say that my father's career as a banker was what made me a writer. But it would be slightly true, and it was certainly the case that his work as a banker made me see that the trade-offs people make between their work and their lives are often badly skewed.

I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing, and business, and playing the piano and so on.

They're called shortcuts for a reason. The shorter they are, the more they usually cut. Nothing is without price.

Look, it can be fast, good, or cheap. You can have any two but never all three.

Life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.

Just because there is a problem doesn't mean that we have to solve it, if the cure is going to be more expensive than the original ailment.

It's a hard job. It means giving up some things, but on the other hand they keep saying you can have it all. You can't really have it all so easy. You can do a little of this and little of that.

I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck

It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

Economists suggest that we should assess the value of decisions in terms of two considerations: the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.

Like you can't have a car that can take the kids to schools on Friday and win the grand prix on Saturday, you can't make a microscope that can do it all.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.

even an ideal set of trade-offs must—and should—leave a whole spectrum of unmet needs, because the cost of wiping out the last vestige of any problem is leaving other problems in more dire condition. In short, trade-offs must be incremental rather than categorical, if limited resources are to produce optimal results in any social system as a whole.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

There isn't any such thing as something free out there. It either gets passed along as increased prices or it gets passed along by people being put out of work so the business can continue to compete.

Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it's high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it's good. Case closed.

Stephenson sees two mutually exclusive options: He can write good novels at a regular rate, or he can answer a lot of individual e-mails and attend conferences, and as a result produce lower-quality novels at a slower rate.

Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it's high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it's good. Case closed.

Thoreau's obsession with calculation helps us move past the vague subjective sense that there are trade-offs inherent in digital clutter, and forces us instead to confront it more precisely. He asks us to treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance—arguably the most valuable substance we possess—and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade