Power In 2026

Some brief examples of the different, varied forms that power can take in our postliberal, Hobbesian world of nasty, brutish, and short lives.

A. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have benefited from the second Trump administration’s exfiltration and prosecution of Venezuela’s President-in-exile Nicolas Maduro. Casino capitalism (Susan Strange) now intersects with geopolitical risk arbitrage. It will be discussed at an upcoming Fed research conference.

B. Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Work (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025) is the latest book to depict how the American and Protestant work ethic is now arbitraged for you to effectively devour yourself via entrepreneurship.

C. Food stamp and welfare fraud is real in the United States - but the perpetrators may not be who you think they are.

D. How to use abductive reasoning for intelligence analysis.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Trials In History created by Professor Elizabeth A. Wood.

F. HR maven Stanford University Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer on how to cultivate power (his books include Power; Leadership BS; and 7 Rules of Power).