I was just visiting a music store where I had taken drum lessons a while back. The owner of the store was telling me how he has had to change his business model because of the sharp increase in internet shopping. In addition, he was telling me how people would go to discount stores to buy the same name brand products he was selling but at a cheaper price only to find out they were buying products of a lesser quality as the products he was selling. In addition, the increase in internet sales not only threatens his business, it threatens many stores where people work and owners earn their wealth.
So in two ways, what my friend was pointing out was that people were shopping without considering the 'trade-offs' of their actions. The term 'trade-off' here is all about the costs-benefits results that comes from a given decision. In my introductory Information Technology class, the definition of 'trade-off' was the first definition I taught. For with most, if not every, decisions we make, there are costs and there are benefits. And it is our responsibility as adults to research the costs and benefits of each potential decision before making a choice. That is because those who are trying to sell us on a product, policy, or person will only tell us about the benefits of what they are selling; they will rarely, if ever, tell us of the costs. An example of a trade-off was when I bought my one and only sports car for a good price. What I didn't consider when purchasing the car was the costs of maintaining the car so that, in the long run, the car costed more than I anticipated and it broke down to the point where I had to get rid of it much sooner than I anticipated.
When people listened to the campaign speeches of both Trump and Clinton, they were drawn to the benefits promised by each candidate. And what each campaign directed people away from were the costs of what they were promising. So when Trump won and started his making America great again agenda, some of the costs that people ignored included the loss of regulations that protected both workers and the environment, the still possible loss of healthcare established under the Obama Administration, and having an unstable person in charge of our Armed Forces and nuclear arsenal at a time when a serious conflict with a nation like North Korea could emerge. It's not that people weren't aware of Trump's personal flaws, it's that they chose to believe that those flaws would not interfere with what he promised to deliver and how he would rule as President.
Those who adhere to political or economic ideologies can also be at risk of making decisions without adequately considering trade-offs. This is especially a concern the more ideological one becomes. For the more ideological one becomes, the more tribal one becomes as well so that one, over time, loses their ability to be objective in recognizing the flaws in their own group and its ideas and the merits that come from other groups and their ideas. The more ideological one becomes, the more one believes that their own group must be fully in charge in order to save whatever portion of the world they are trying to save. The more ideological one becomes the more one believes that their own group cannot afford to share power and work with other groups to solve our problems. That is because the more ideological one becomes, the inherent tribalism that accompanies that affinity for that ideological approach causes one to believe that their group has everything to teach and nothing to learn from others--note that description borrows from a Martin Luther King Jr statement about the West during the Vietnam War.
As mentioned before, as tribalism results from one's growing adherence to a given ideology, the more one's ability to be objective diminishes so that there is not just an inability to recognize the trade-offs of the ideas one is promoting, there is an unwillingness to acknowledge the costs incurred by the carrying out of one's beliefs. That unwillingness becomes hostility to any challenges made to one's own grup and ideology. And that is where we sit now.
On most websites that promote a given political-economic ideology, we see that the description of one's own ideology is one that claims to have an exclusive ownership to the solutions of our most pressing problems. And it is that belief that their ideology alone will save us is what blinds them to the trade-offs that are inherent in their ideas. And whether their ideological tribalism will blind us to the trade-offs of their views and the automatic rejection of anything that other ideologies have to offer depends on whether we will choose to act as adults.
The adult decision when presented with any given political-economic ideology is to first be skeptical of any exclusive claims a group makes to having the truth and owning the solutions to our problems. The adult decision when presented with any given political-economic ideology is to investigate and find at least some of the costs that any ideological proposal carries if implemented. And the adult decision when presented with any given political-economic ideology is to examine other political-economic ideologies to see what trade-offs they have so that one starts to borrow from different ideologies in order to create hybrid solutions.
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