2025 was a year of deep and far-reaching disruption, tragic preventable mass death, and staggering breakdown in public trust. The risks and costs stemming from the deviations of 2025 will be with us for generations to come. 2026 presents an opportunity to set humankind on course for healing and liberation.
The ‘K-shaped economy’ is failure.
Whether that happens and what the process of healing and liberation looks like will be determined by decisions made day by day, both in the halls of power and in local everyday economic life. The efficacy of everyday recovery strategies will hinge on official awareness that a “K-shaped economy“ (where incomes at the top diverge more and more radically from everyone else’s) is economic failure, even if many powerful people feel immune to the worsening strain.
In a recent poll, 70% of Americans said their local communities are no longer affordable. The newly sworn in Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, promised to address this worsening crisis of inequality and rising costs, saying:
City Hall will deliver an agenda of safety, affordability, and abundance, where government looks and lives like the people it represents, never flinches in the fight against corporate greed, and refuses to cower before challenges that others have deemed too complicated.
In so doing, we will provide our own answer to that age-old question — who does New York belong to? Well, my friends, we can look to Madiba and the South African Freedom Charter: New York “belongs to all who live in it.”
The new Democratic mayor is not alone in noting the need to improve affordability. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has also promised to respond to the crisis in surging prices by moving to cap the rate of property tax increases. Whether this is possible remains to be seen; economists are skeptical about such an approach, and the state already gave up more than $50 billion in needed revenue in last year’s budget.
Either way, the President saying affordability is a partisan “hoax” is not a wise political strategy. That much is obvious even to his most ardent supporters, most of whom are feeling the strain of increasingly unaffordable everyday local economies. These demands for a more equitable and open middle-class economy express universal needs and aspirations, as a new wave of mass protest in Iran makes clear.
Leadership seeks shared, sustainable good.
2026 will require upgraded leadership in the public and private sectors, with recognition and reinforcement of the benefits of good governance standards, transparency and accountability, and support for innovations that bring greater agency and wellbeing to those being left out of the “K-shaped economy”.
The following stand out as key areas of opportunity:
- Reinvestment in vibrant local economies;
- Aligning innovation with climate resilience;
- Fine-tuning emerging tech to be less chaotic and more constructive;
- Financial innovation that rebalances economic clout;
- Shifting incentives to reduce pollution and increase agency.
The first step will be to reckon more honestly with the costs of business as usual. For too long, we have accepted an economic and financial standard that does not consider hidden costs. The result is spiraling risk, cost, and waste, and price pressures that have come to permeate the economy.
A key breakthrough in 2026 could be the recognition, both in policy and in practice, that not all power resides with national authorities. Functioning societies organize through local policy and innovative science and enterprise. A significant amount of the power to change the future is in the hands of people who have not been recognized as the guiding force for shaping our economy.
Innovative finance has a role to play:
- Decentralized, smaller-scale cooperative finance institutions;
- Technology-driven integration of non-financial performance standards into financial transactions;
- Community-level small and medium-sized enterprises focused on cooperative de-risking, data services, and sustainable investment;
- Mainstream banking services that support climate risk reduction and resilience measures.
Climate cooperation holds far more promise than any other area of international future-building. The “non-market approaches” (to accelerating climate-resilient development) outlined in the Paris Agreement allow for mutual expansion of co-benefits across all partner countries. These include:
- Low-cost abundant clean energy;
- Reinvestment in local economies, improving lives and incomes;
- Progress across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals—each of which builds real and durable economic value and grounds for wellbeing at the local and national levels;
- Poverty eradication, food security, fiscal risk reduction;
- Enhanced investment in sustainable infrastructure.
Measure everything against human rights.
Security, geopolitics, and technology are colliding in potentially transformative ways. In a stunning report on the rise of “killer AI drones”, The New York Times reports:
Throughout 2025 in the war between Russia and Ukraine, in largely unseen and unheralded moments like the warehouse strike in Borysivka, the era of killer robots has begun to take shape on the battlefield. Across the roughly 800-mile front and over the airspace of both nations, drones with newly developed autonomous features are now in daily combat use.
The semi-autonomous drones use AI to continue toward their target after jamming technology interferes with their remote navigation and command capability. This has the effect of overriding a battlefield imbalance. While this can help a nation under attack better defend itself against a powerful aggressor, it is clear the world now needs new laws to restrict the use of AI weaponry.
Human rights should be the standard against which these innovations, and the laws governing their use, are measured. The rights to life and liberty, and against arbitrary acts of violence, demand that no weapons system be enabled to make targeting decisions. Such a capability would erase due process rights and could put the Geneva Conventions and universal human rights at risk.
2025 has also shown there is a need for laws restricting the use of secret police or paramilitary “goon squads”, because they create a similar risk of arbitrary violence, human rights violations, and gross impunity. Security forces can become a grave threat to peace and prosperity when the agents and those they target are systematically dehumanized by abusive leaders. Accountability and rule of law must be priorities, especially in warfare and the politics of security.
There is a new and legitimately worrying possibility of widespread breakdown in security conditions in 2026. That risk of breakdown is driven by the impacts of climate disruption, by worsening income inequality across the world, by systemic misallocations of capital, and by breaches of international laws barring aggression and crimes against humanity.
The race to develop dominant artificial intelligence systems has led to a push for minimal regulation of big tech. This risks another kind of chaotic impunity that will undermine public trust and create serious economic degradation. Capital cannot go to only one industry, and the ad hoc creation of special zones of impunity cannot be the way a society subsidizes innovation.
All of the other immense opportunities of 2026 will be sidelined if authoritarian abuses are able to displace faithful governance and open civics. The 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report called for civic renewal as a way to unlock local insights, optimal innovation timelines, and expanded investment opportunities. All of this is better achieved through a steadfast recognition of universal human rights.
Civic renewal must include several elements of practice and effect:
- Places where people of conscience can gather and work together on common problems, without fear of partisan interference or political coercion;
- Engagement strategies that allow for sharing of diverse ideas but filter out vitriol and animus, so people can hear each other;
- Tools that allow vulnerable communities and other stakeholders to shape imaginative, responsible decisions in high-level spaces, for the benefit of all;
- Systems that value non-financial and non-ideological data and subjective inputs, which can inform decision-makers across the mainstream.
Empower people and communities.
Peace and prosperity need roots. They do not arise, establish a foothold, and endure, when conditions are preferential to conflict, abuse of power, illicit dealing, and impunity.
While national leaders focus on boosting advanced technology, extractive industries, and security spending, the opportunities that will best serve their people are linked to reducing geophysical risk, localizing innovation and leadership, opening up civic processes, and constructive multilateral cooperation for climate-resilient development. Data can improve the effectiveness of decentralized systems, but the enticements of automation need to be resisted, to favor to the benefits of enhanced human agency, especially in underserved and vulnerable communities.
Geodesiq Strategies 