Reader question:

Please explain this sentence, with “trade-off” in particular: Every choice we make is a trade-off.

My comments:

Say, A, B, C are there for us to choose from. You can only take one pick. Pick A and you’re deprived of the opportunity to work with B and C.

Pick B and you’re deprived of the chance of working with A and C.

Likewise, pick C and you’re deprived of A and B.

And this situation is likened to a trade-off, and exchange of goods. A straightforward trade-off is, for example, a basket of chicken eggs for a bag of potatoes. One farmer who raises a lot of chickens will trade off some of his chicken eggs in exchange for a bag of potatoes from a potato grower.

Off, as in sell-off, suggests something is gone. After the chicken eggs are traded off, the chicken raiser no longer has those eggs. Instead, he has gained a bag of potatoes.

Psychologically, every choice you make can be considered a trade-off because every time you make a choice, you are giving up other choices, knowingly or unwittingly.

For example, if you decide to shoot basketball for two hours, you’re depriving yourself the chance of doing other things for those two hours, such as going shopping or, as is more likely these days, staring at you mobile phone for all that time.

One choice may be better than another but since you cannot choose two activities at the same time, the choice making process can be looked at as a trade-off, trading one activity off for another.

Hence, as is stated above, every choice we make is a trade-off.

It is our hope, of course, to always make good trade-offs.

But, apparently, we don’t always do that.

Otherwise there’d be no such thing as regret or remorse.

Oh, well.

Trade-off, by the way, is also spelled tradeoff, one word. Both spellings are acceptable. But in your writing, you’d better stick with one because being consistent with one’s spelling is good form.

So, trade-off or tradeoff?

The choice is yours.

All right, here are media examples of trade-off in the figurative sense:

1. I first got to know Sally Rooney back in 2015 when our mutual friend, Tom Morris, introduced us via email. We read each other’s work, gave feedback, and after a few months of keeping up this correspondence, we finally met for the first time in person in Simon’s Place, a cafe in George’s Street Arcade, Dublin. It’s fitting, then, that this interview took place in that same venue, on the bottom floor at a table facing the stairs. It was a balmy Wednesday afternoon in August, and we were both a bit flustered by the heat.

Three months before, Sally published her debut novel, Conversations with Friends, with Faber & Faber. Following Frances and Bobbi, Trinity students who befriend a married couple, Nick and Melissa, Conversations is about four people who centre their complex relationships around discussions of sex, art, politics and gender. I was conscious of the sheer amount of readings, appearances, literary events and interviews Sally had done, and how this must’ve been beginning to tire her. My worry swiftly dissipated; she was receptive, enthusiastic and articulate in her responses, so much so that there were instances during the conversation in which I forgot that I was interviewing Sally at all.

How did you come to embracing your kind of lucid, concise style? Did it come naturally to you? Was it something you came to over time? Or is it informed by the things you’ve read?

It’s so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You’re never conscious of why you’re producing it. It probably did come from the kind of books I was attracted to reading. It’s funny though. On the one hand it’s that kind of spare prose that you could say is Hemingway-onward. The pared-back sentences. And I do like that mid-century American prose style. But then the other element of style is that hyper-aware, culturally switched on thing. I guess that comes from contemporary writers like Ben Lerner. And again, you’re not consciously trying to draw from a book you’ve read like a week ago. The style isn’t just about paring back sentences. It’s also about what level of awareness you’re trying to incorporate into the narrator’s vocabulary. Like that auto-fiction stuff, where it’s impossible to distinguish between the narrator and the actual author behind it. Obviously, that isn’t the case with Conversations, because I’ve given Frances a different name and she does different things that I’ve never done, but there is an extent to which she is not a conventional protagonist that’s completely separate from the consciousness of the author, where it’s very clear what the author’s attitude towards her is.

Does this hyper-awareness, or hyper-intimacy, have something to do with Conversations being in the first person? Is there a correlation between the writing style and how it is written in the first person?

Often when people think of first-person writing they think of stream of consciousness, which this obviously is not. It’s very controlled, usually quite short sentences, and it’s not particularly lyrical. How much does that have to do with Frances as a psychological presence in the book? Obviously, the style of the book is her style. She is the narrator, and I think it speaks to the particular cultural position she’s in, as an arts student, and the textual influences she has. She reads cultural theory and that informs how she looks at the world as much as literary prose.

Which is interesting, because it’s an incredibly readable book. People seem to be blasting through it, yet the book is very much about theory, and politics.

Yeah, that is interesting, isn’t it? To me, anyway. Sometimes I think that it’s maybe reaching an audience that aren’t necessarily familiar with the texts that influence the style. So sometimes I’m hearing back influences and I’m like, really? That person? But maybe in a way that’s because it sits in that awkward position between being quite an accessible read, and also having a heritage of influence that's not necessarily so accessible.

One of the hazards of novels written in the first person is that people are quick to suggest that the book is biographical. Is this something you’ve encountered with Conversations with Friends?

Oh my God, loads. Like loads. And people are so unabashed about it. When I was doing that Ryan Tubridy interview, it was breakfast radio, like 9am on RTé, and he’s like, “Have you ever had an affair with a married man?” I come on to talk about my book and I’m getting asked about my sex life. It’s so, so strange. So definitely on that level. But I made the mistake, in my opinion, of responding by saying “No”, when what I should’ve said was “It’s actually none of your business”.

...

Alexandra Schwartz, in her review of Conversations for The New Yorker, highlights the parallels between the Catholic Church and capitalism in Ireland. She says, “Capitalism is to Rooney’s young women what Catholicism was to Joyce’s young men, a rotten national faith to contend with, though how exactly to resist capitalism, when it has sunk its teeth so deep into the human condition, remains an open question.”

Yes. I thought that was really interesting. It seems to me that in many ways the deterioration of the power of the Catholic Church was replaced pretty much wholesale with the power of the free market, and free-market ideology has replaced Catholic ideology. We see that as liberating because we have things like the contraceptive pill now, which is good, but what has replaced the values we had on community, family and things like that? The free market has nothing to say about, no concern for, and in fact has even open hostility towards these things. To me, it doesn’t seem like straightforward progress. We got rid of the Catholic Church and replaced it with predatory capitalism. In some ways that was a good trade off, and in other ways, really bad. I think that was definitely a very insightful line in the New Yorker.

- Sally Rooney: ‘A large part of my style has definitely developed through writing emails’, by Michael Nolan, IrishTimes.com, November 13, 2017.

2. Federal Reserve officials gave their clearest signal yet that they’re willing to tolerate a recession as the necessary trade-off for regaining control of inflation.

Policy makers, criticized for being too late to realize the scale of the U.S. inflation problem, are moving aggressively to catch up. They raised interest rates by 75 basis points on Wednesday for the third time in a row and forecast a further 1.25 percentage points of tightening before year end.

That was more hawkish than expected by economists. In addition, officials cut growth projections, raised their unemployment outlook and Chair Jerome Powell repeatedly spoke of the painful slowdown that’s needed to curb price pressures running at the highest levels since the 1980s.

“Powell’s admission that there will be below-trend growth for a period should be translated as central bank speak for ‘recession,’” said Seema Shah of Principal Global Investors. “Times are going to get tougher from here.”

To be clear, Fed officials aren’t explicitly projecting a recession. But Powell’s rhetoric about the rate hikes likely causing pain for workers and businesses has gotten progressively sharper in recent months. On Wednesday, in his post-meeting press conference, Powell said a soft landing with only a small increase in joblessness would be “very challenging.”

“No one knows whether this process will lead to a recession or if so, how significant that recession would be,” Powell told reporters after officials lifted the target range for their benchmark rate to 3% to 3.25%. “The chances of a soft landing are likely to diminish to the extent that policy needs to be more restrictive, or restrictive for longer. Nonetheless, we’re committed to getting inflation back down to 2%.”

That sober assessment is in sharp contrast from six months ago, when Fed officials first started raising rates from near zero and pointed to the economy’s strength as a positive – something that would shield people from feeling the effects of a cooling economy.

Officials now implicitly acknowledge, via their more pessimistic unemployment projections, that demand will need to be curtailed at every level of the economy, as inflation has proved to be persistent and widespread.

- Recession may be necessary trade-off to regain control of inflation, warns Powell, InvestmentNews.com, September 22, 2022.

3. Faced with a $44.9-billion budget deficit, Gov. Gavin Newsom described a plan to shrink the size of state government and slow his progressive policy agenda by eliminating 10,000 vacant state jobs, pausing an expansion of subsidized childcare and cutting billions in funding for climate change programs.

Newsom’s revised $288-billion budget proposal, announced Friday, projected California’s deficit to be $7 billion more than the shortfall his administration expected in January. The grim forecast was driven by lower than projected state revenues, continuing a pendulum swing from the fiscal boom of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“These are things we worked closely with the Legislature to advance,” Newsom said of the cuts. “None of this is the kind of work you enjoy doing, but you’ve got to do it. We have to be responsible. We have to be accountable.”

Newsom’s plan to close the deficit relies on $17.3 billion in savings from budget cuts he and lawmakers agreed to in April and using $4.2 billion from the state’s rainy day fund and budget reserves for the upcoming fiscal year.

The proposed spending reductions Newsom touched on Friday also reverse and slash an additional $8.2 billion in funding in 2024-25.

...

How will the governor’s cuts affect education?

Under Proposition 98, California has a minimum funding guarantee for schools and community colleges. Newsom is proposing an unusual maneuver to go back and lower the funding requirement for 2022-23 to reflect the lower-than-expected state revenues that came in late last year. The change could ultimately reduce funding for schools by tens of billions of dollars in future years and launch a monumental fight over education funding at the state Capitol.

Early childhood programs face cuts of more than $2 billion in the governor’s new budget proposal, including a 45% cut for the CalWORKS home visiting program, which provides supportive visits to about 3,000 low-income families following the birth of a baby.

He wants to reduce the Middle Class Scholarship program by $510 million and cut $550 million from a program that helps build and upgrade facilities for children in preschool and transitional kindergarten over the next two budget years.

Newsom called a decision to pause $1.4 billion planned to expand child-care availability over two years “difficult,” but a necessary trade-off in order to pay child-care workers higher wages.

- What to know about Gov. Newsom’s plan to offset California’s $45-billion deficit, LATimes.com, May 10, 2024.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣）