Post 33. Looking back to the first quarter of the 21st Century and the future ahead

2025 was a grim year for human rights, peace, democracy, and our trust in both national and international organizations. I delayed my bleak review for the holiday season, hoping to write something cheerful for the New Year. After the first week of the New Year, all I can say is: may the New Year not make us miss the old. So far, international developments haven’t given me more optimism than that.

The kidnapping of the president of another country and claiming land and resources of other nations were the latest developments in global diplomacy, or lack of it. But we had seen so many new developments and so many shocks in the first quarter of our fragile Century that nothing surprises us anymore.

Richard Partington from The Guardian summarized the economic outlook for 2026 using five charts. The biggest threats he identified were a tech bubble in the US stock market, inflation, trade tensions, government debt, and unemployment. As the situation worsens, we may have another, even more shocking incident to occupy public opinion.

The danger of a stock market crash remains a serious threat, argued Gita Gopinath, the former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, in October 2025. She estimated that a stock market crash comparable to the one in 2002 that ended the dot-com boom could erase approximately $20 trillion in the US and another $15 trillion internationally, triggering a global recession. Of course, many of these predictions focus on potential problems for countries and people with money. For the rest of the world, condemned to live in poverty under authoritarian rule, the prospects are not even thinkable.

I almost forgot how many stock market crashes, market corrections, global or regional crises, wars, epidemics, and natural disasters we have experienced over the last 25 years. We moved from one shock to another. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

The threats of climate change exacerbate conditions in some of the most populous and vulnerable regions worldwide. Environmental and natural disasters and regional wars threaten the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions. The new restrictions imposed on population movements, anti-immigrant rhetoric, demonizing of refugees, and rising poverty threaten the political stability of many nation-states that emerged in the post-World War II era or turn them into concentration camps for the despondent.

The World Social Report 2025 sounded an alarm about the global social crisis, arguing that “a rising tide of insecurity, inequality, and distrust is fracturing communities worldwide and eroding the foundations of global stability.” The report warned that trust in institutions has declined to alarming levels, with more than half of the global population having little confidence in their governments or in one another, “indicating systemic breakdown in social cohesion.” The failure of the UN, international diplomacy, and national and international institutions creates a very dangerous social and political environment globally.

On the other hand, inequality has been rising to record levels. World Inequality Report 2026 shows that “[t]he top 0.001%—fewer than 60,000 multimillionaires—owns three times more wealth than the entire bottom half of humanity combined. Within almost every region, the top 1% alone hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined,” and because the global financial system favours rich countries “around 1% of the global GDP flows each year from poorer to richer countries through net income transfers associated with persistent excess yields and lower interest payments on rich-country liabilities, nearly three times the amount of global development aid.” As superpowers rush to claim or partition other nations’ land and resources, the risk of regional conflicts and even a world war increases dramatically.

Each historical era brings new insecurities and new hopes. The inaugural speech on January 1^st, 2026, by the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was one of these new hopes. May the new year bring us more hope and less insecurity.