Bill Bradley Quotes

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

Find the appropriate balance of competing claims by various groups of stakeholders. All claims deserve consideration but some claims are more important than others.

Hawks usually care about benefits; doves most about costs. Neither benefits or costs however are easily estimated in advance.

When something becomes a business, 50% of your decisions are what you have to do and not what you want to do.

All policy is a matter of gains and losses, upsides and downsides.

As a member of Congress, I'm often reminded that in baseball, as in diplomacy, you have to know when to hit, when to run, and when to show grace.

Strategy 101 is about choices: You can't be all things to all people.

We have the means and the capacity to deal with our problems, if only we can find the political will.

Everything we do in public policy prevents us from doing something else. To govern is to choose.

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.

If you have difficulties making a decision, choose the lesser of the two evils.

Because economics is all about optimising, doing the best you can with what you have - it's usually the first place you should look for answers if you want to maximise your happiness.

Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.

The compromise will always be more expensive than either of the suggestions it is compromising.

This may not be the most serious problem in the world, but it is a familiar one: How do you divide a piece of cake equally between two children and also make sure that each of them sees it as a fair division?

If we ask for more and more material for the construction, i.e. more and more choice, we're likely to end up with a lot of combinations that don't do much for us or are far more complex than they need to be.

Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them.

You are going to make choices and decisions that sometimes aren't going to always work in your favor and they are going to upset some other people.

The old approach of sacrificing the needs of one group to benefit another just won't work.

There are a lot of issues that I hope we deal with at some point that we haven't up to now, for various reasons. Some technical, and some more political.

When you are President you have to get something done, and that often means compromise.

No you wouldn’t. Not if I were there … It is my party as much as yours, and I answer that we should offer to pay.

One of the problems of being a prime minister is that you can't do what people want all at once.

Principles and rules are binding, but when they come into conflict they must be balanced.

We must strike a balance between speed and thoroughness, between the need for time frames and the avoidance of mistakes which will later cost us dearly.