The Six Megatrends That Define 2026
The trends and megatrends that define 2026
Every week, I save dozens of screenshots of charts, essay passages, science and economics papers, and tweets. Every few months, I collect my favorite ideas, organize them by topic, and publish them in this newsletter.
In this edition, I’m trying something a bit more ambitious. I’ve organized the morsels of information under several themes—let’s call them: “megatrends”—that define the 2026 news cycle and that I think will continue to shape the world in the months, and years, to come.
Today’s megatrends span economics, health, artificial intelligence, culture, politics, and media. Free subscribers will get to read the first two megatrends, on economics and health—plus a “historical interlude” that was too interesting to leave out. Only paid subscribers will get to read more about the state of AI, a paradox in politics, and an eerie new trend in the media.
MEGATREND #1: ECONOMICS
The Peter Pan Economy
If it seems like young people are mired in an extended adolescence, it might be because the 2020s economy hasn’t made it easy for them to grow up. This has been the Tragic Twenties with one crisis after another: the pandemic, inflation, rising interest rates, and a flurry of existential AI worries. Today young people are grappling with a declining hiring rate, lower employment levels, higher housing costs, unaffordable cities, a Boomer Bottleneck in the labor force, and overwhelming support for older Americans over younger Americans at the federal level and throughout the economy.
It’s a rough time to get hired. For the last few years, the overall hiring rate has steadily declined. According to analysis by the Economic Innovation Group, the employment rate for young workers with and without a college degree has declined since the summer of 2023.
It’s a rough time to buy a house. At the same time that hiring has slipped and employment rates have fallen, the cost of buying a new home has surged in the 2020s. Due to the surge in interest rates, the “penalty” for buying a home now versus already being a homeowner is higher than it’s been in any period in the last four decades.
There’s a Boomer bottleneck at the office. Even after they get hired, many young people feel like they struggle to move up at their company, as older workers are retiring later and hanging onto jobs longer. In the 2024 paper “Countries for Old Men,” economists found that the pay gap between younger and older workers has increased in older and larger firms. Think of it like a game of musical chairs: When companies don’t grow quickly, and when Boomers are sitting in all the upper-level management positions, it makes it harder for young people to move up through the company, and this can result in suppressed wage growth for Millennials and Gen Z.
Childless cities are spreading. Fertility has been declining in the U.S. for decades. But it’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen the acceleration of what I’ve called “the childless city.” Whereas the urbanist Sam Bass Warner once wrote that the “basic custom” of the American city was a “commitment to familialism,” today’s cities are increasingly inhospitable to children. Between 2010 and 2024, according to an Economist analysis of Census Bureau data, the total population aged under 18 declined by 12% in New York City, 22% in Chicago, and 23% in Los Angeles. There are many reasons why today’s young people are having fewer children, and one of those reasons is that millions of Americans in their child-bearing years like to live in cities that have a tendency to repel the very thought of family formation, whether it’s because of costs, home sizes, safety fears, all three, or something else.
Old people’s spending drives the economy, Part I. While young people are struggling, federal spending is not well set up to ease their troubles. In fact, national spending on seniors is roughly ten times higher than average spending on children and young adults. An analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model finds that average annual federal spending on seniors is roughly $43,000, compared to about $4,300 for children and young adults.
Old people’s spending drives the economy, Part II. I once joked to my friend Conor Sen that the US economy was like a Friday night church service: All old people plus an attempt to summon the divine. What I meant was that the labor market seemed overwhelmingly driven by health care spending on old people while business investment seemed entirely driven by artificial intelligence spending. The Bloomberg writer Matthew Boesler makes this point even more concrete. While business investment in “computers, peripheral equipment and software” has increased to a record-high share of GDP, health care services spending has also reached a record high.
Matthew B@boes_Two charts showing how imbalanced the U.S. economy is becoming, from today's data: Business investment in computers, peripheral equipment and software on one hand—and health care services spending on the other—both rose to a record as a share of GDP (bloomberg.com/news/articles/…)
2:08 PM · Feb 20, 2026 · 60.2K Views3 Replies · 16 Reposts · 71 Likes
MEGATREND #2: HEALTH
Building the Do-It-All Drug
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide), made by Novo Nordisk, and Zepbound (tirzepatide), made by Eli Lilly, have demonstrated extraordinary effects beyond the treatment of type-2 diabetes and obesity. In the last few months, randomized studies have shown GLP-1s can reduce psoriasis severity by up to 80%, treat addiction disorders, ameliorate several kinds of mental distress, and melt fatty liver disease. New and better GLP-1 drugs are waiting in the wings. Let’s review what these drugs can and can’t yet do—and what’s coming next.
Help with addiction disorders? Yes. A placebo-controlled, double-blind trial of Ozempic found that the drug reduced both heavy drinking days and overall alcohol consumption among people seeking treatment for addiction.
Help with mental distress and anxiety? Yup. An April study of more than 100,000 people in Swedish electronic health registers found that semaglutide use was associated with lower risk of worsening mental illness, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and worsening substance use disorder.
Crush fatty liver disease? 100%. (Er, well, 80%.) The next big GLP-1 drug coming down the pike is retatrutide. While the first generation of GLP-1 drugs targets the GLP-1 hormone exclusively, Lilly’s popular Mounjaro drug (a.k.a., tirzepatide) targets two hormones: GLP-1 and GIP. Retatrutide is a triple agonist that targets three gut hormones: GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. Reta is most celebrated for its historic weight-loss effects, which seem even more dramatic than tirzepatide or semaglutide. But in a recent study, patients on retatrutide saw an 80 percent reduction in liver fat. Fatty liver disease affects millions of Americans, and there is no FDA-approved treatment for it other than admonitions to lose weight. But retatrutide’s targeting of glucagon seems to melt liver fat even more effectively than it causes weight loss.
Stop Alzheimer’s? Not yet. A Novo Nordisk-funded trial of oral semaglutide among elderly Americans found that the drug did not seem to slow worsening Alzheimer’s symptoms. In the charts below, you’ll see two groups—BLUE on semaglutide vs. RED on a placebo. The nearly identical declines on a cognitive test over 156 weeks indicate that GLP-1s failed to make much of a difference in the progression of the disease. (It’s still possible that the use of GLP-1s earlier in life reduces the likelihood of ever developing Alzheimer’s, but this hasn’t been studied yet, and a high-quality study could take many years, or even decades.)
Fuck everything, we’re doing five agonists. The Onion once published an article entitled “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades,” in which an imaginary Gillette executive proposes adding a fifth blade to the company’s new razor. (”I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!”) Well, somebody from pharma took that essay as inspiration. While semaglutide, tirzepatide, and retatrutide target one, two, and three hormones, respectively, scientists are now exploring a quintuple agonist “that combines the body weight-reducing and blood glucose-lowering effects of GLP-1R–GIPR co-agonism with the insulin-sensitizing and anti-inflammatory effects of lanifibranor via its targeted delivery into GLP-1R- and GIPR-expressing cells.” As scientists add targets, one could imagine a GLP-1 drug that both melts fat, fights inflammation, and even preserves muscle tone. In other words, I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth agonist in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
Historical interlude: Creativity secrets of Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas could write. What the man couldn’t do was stop writing. By his death, Dumas had produced more than 100,000 pages of book text, which is the equivalent of writing a novel the length of War and Peace every seven months, for four straight decades. In his miracle years of 1844 to 1846, Dumas wrote both The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the latter of which is both incredibly long (more than 1,200 pages in most modern editions) and also considered by many one of the greatest novels of all time.
How did he do it? Dumas was “often accused of operating a fiction factory,” Michael Dirda writes. But the fact that none of his research assistants achieved anything of note on their own strongly suggests that Dumas was the final hand to put pen to paper. His workflow:
[Dumas’s] particular genius lay in transmuting dry historical records into vibrant page-turners through his mastery of dialogue, pacing, and dramatic confrontation. Dumas would first talk over a book with an assistant, perhaps ask him to do some research and prepare an outline, then follow up with further discussion of the action and plot, this time in more detail. Only when he had settled the whole are of the novel in his own mind did Dumas put pen to paper. As he once said, “As a rule I do not begin a book until it is finished.” He then wrote fast, a single draft on blue paper, never bothering about accents, commas, and punctuation, working long hours at a time.
“Do not begin a piece of writing until it is finished” is a fun idea. Personally, I think my best essays are similarly “finished” before they are “started.” That is, if I begin the writing process without really knowing what I want to say, I wind up not saying much of anything but rather circling, circling, circling a strong contention that would have been better developed if I had done more research or talked to more people. My best essays are sometimes the ones whose theses I can describe in detail before I write the first sentence of the final draft.
