Last broadcast’s Coherence Metric score was 2.803 ,placing it #16 overall! To understand what the Coherence Metric score is, check it out here, while last week’s broadcast can be found at the bottom of this one :)
Hello everyone, today’s broadcast will be an examination of change and time, and the interplay the two. Changes in a short space of time are very noticeable, likely to create a sharp reaction from others. Small changes, imperceptible from day to day, can compound to have an immense impact over a longer period of time.
The little things
James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits’ book has a central tenet of aiming to improve yourself by 1% a day, building tiny habits and maintaining them is much more effective than trying to overhaul your life in a day. Small habits are easy to maintain, but maintaining motivation to keep doing the big changes is very very difficult. Whatever it is, whether its reading for 5 minutes a day, taking a walk in the morning, reading the news, the small change will not impact your life significantly in the first week. But over time, when these habits become ingrained, your lifestyle would certainly improve massively, just from small bursts of effort every day.
A Short Story
Whenever i used to read about sanctions being placed on countries, I always scoffed at these actions, seeming as little more than political theatre. My justification was always that there were ways around these sanctions, whether from personal experience in the logistics business, learning about the ways Marc Rich and Glencore got around sanctions and traded with Gaddafi's Libya, Apartheid South Africa and other sanctioned agents, as well as not really seeing any concrete impact on the political situation after the fact.
Even in 2022, when Russia re-launched their invasion, and the subsequent western sanctions took hold, the effect appeared to be minimal, only reinforcing my beliefs. Trade was often re-routed through intermediary countries that didn’t sanction Russia, and Russia was able to rely on resources and finance flowing from its operations in Africa.
However, after coming across and listening to a interview (it’s killing me that I forgot the name, I haven’t found it, but when I do I’ll post it in the comments) I was grading the effectiveness of sanctions against the wrong criteria: they are designed to work over the long term, over the span of even decades:
For instance, lets say country A, along with the majority of the rest of the world imposes sanctions on country B. These sanctions say that there will be no flow of goods or funds between these nations and country B. The sanctioned country suffers initially, but after a couple of weeks, it is able to pivot and retain 99% of previous economic activity and maintain 99% of previous economic growth, that 1% lost will compound over time into a significant disadvantage.
From my understanding, this is the point of sanctions- the fact that the targeted country can get around them is known, but it doesn’t matter as long as they can’t recover 100% of what they lost. And this advantage to the original country will rise over time, crippling the sanctioned country’s ability to challenge economically, and in turn militarily and culturally. Such a strategy has arguably worked wonders for The USA even before the Pax Americana, deploying sanctions against countries such as the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and recently Russia.
Additional benefit is that this change is slow, so not immediately destabilizing. If the USA opted to go to direct military confrontation or go after Russia’s leadership, this would become too costly, too unpredictable, leaving behind power vacuums, from which even greater issues could arise for the USA.
Sprinting during the first mile of the race
Another strategy which I have viewed with very skeptical lenses is boycotting companies by the public. These boycotts can be seen as a more retail version of sanctions, aiming to financially punish an economic agent. A phenomenon that has gained popularity in USA in recent years, used by both the left and the right, as a way of punishing companies for marketing decisions, quotes from CEO’s, anything that ruffles their political feathers.
These boycotts have seen some mixed success at best, with the most successful impacting a firm's quarterly profits and being mentioned as a reason for the drop, while many fizzle out after a couple of weeks.
While boycotts could have the same potential as sanctions, they lack the same focus, discipline and intensity as a government sanctions: after a few weeks, when the fanfare has died down or there is a new thing to get angry about, people forget to boycott or the reason why they are doing it in the first place.
A Brief Tangent(rant)
Just on a side, I find it very weird how we look to see what are the stances of company’s on political issues-as if looking to a father figure to decide what our opinion should be: I heavily doubt that Starbucks as a corporate entity has heavy beliefs about whether a country should adopt stricter zoning policies. To be honest, there is nothing i could say that summarizes this more more cleanly and precisely than the onion: (Here's the full article if you want to read it in full :)
This may be too cynical, but companies, deep down, when the going gets tough, prioritize profit and return to shareholders. If they believe speaking out will give it a reputational boost, encouraging higher demand, then they will speak out. The public goodwill is just a bonus on top of that.
The Pace of Changes
Lets pivot back to changes and the pace of these changes. Even in our fast moving world, changes are still mostly slow or gradual. And yet, as people we still demand and yearn to see changes fast, and our behaviour changes if it doesn’t. Many people are often demotivated and stop trying new things if after an hour or session or two they are still not ‘good’ at it. This is especially apparent in scenario’s where even progress is hard to spot, but even in situations where it is, it is often seen as too small to satisfy a person.
For instance, how many times has a new investor checked their new investment they just made, even though they made that investment for the long term? Or how many times have you learned a new skill in a sport and wanted to try it out, only to be worse and you are over-focusing on that one aspect?
And this is only about changes that we want or desire. What about the negative changes? People are quick to spot big, immediate ones, such as a new restrictive law banning certain freedoms, or a large escalation of violence, but it is difficult for us to spot, much less pay attention and direct resources to slower, more nuanced changes: global warming being the prime example.
Another example being the use of forever chemicals, and their pervasion into every area of the globe, estimated to be in the bloodstreams of around 90% of the global population. These have been linked to things such as cancers to conditions linked to fetal brain damage, thyroid damage,etc. Ironically, in today’s polarised world, the one thing that can unite all of us if the fact that we are all contaminated by chemicals that could potentially lead to our death. Fun!
Even with the world appearing to become faster and faster, change will still always be slower than we want it to be, and even if changes do speed up, their effect and full impact will still take time. But that doesn’t mean you should slack off starting something even if the impact comes later in life- If you ever want something in life, start now.
Make sure to give this broadcast a coherence score!
That’s all from me for now, but stay tuned for future broadcasts,
This has been Kunga’s Written Radio,
Check out last week’s broadcast here →