ABSTRACT
One of life’s painful truisms is that difficult choices are unavoidable. This truism holds up pretty well whether we are talking about managing individual lives or complex social systems. At the individual level, we run into a multitude of familiar value trade-offs: obligations to others versus self-interest, self-interest now (consumption) versus self-interest later (savings), autonomy versus intimacy, work versus family versus leisure, and the common dilemma of accountability to conflicting constituencies (in order to please this person or reference group, I must anger this other one). At a societal level, we confront an equally daunting battery of trade-offs. In political economy, there is the classic tension between social equality and economic efficiency. In international relations, there are the contradictory goals of deterrence (be strong enough to resist exploitation) and reassurance (don’t be so intimidating that you scare the other side into premptively attacking you). The list is potentially endless, but we have already made our point: the world can be a very dissonant place. It is impossible to arrange our lives and our values to escape trade-offs completely.
