Money is a proxy; it carries meaning, without being bound to any one purpose. When money changes hands, the exchange reflects what people involved in the exchange value, and implicitly, it reflects the wider landscape of value considerations in a society. When money is too scarce for most people, that signals a societal failure to invest for shared prosperity.
2025 and 2026 have seen record stock market valuations, especially for corporations invested in artificial intelligence or related activities. And yet, everyday costs across the world are rising, and the average household is not seeing sufficient increases in income to accommodate surging prices. Trade restrictions, armed conflict, and a counterproductive background of climate disruption and Nature loss, are making it harder to address worsening income inequality.
Mainstream financial market data tells us which stock, debt instrument, or commodity is favored for short- to-medium-term increases in value, and that story can change day to day. Speculators look to maximize their overall returns by seizing the moment. In principle, the open movement of capital makes it easier to finance a strong, diversified, and inclusive mainstream economy. In practice, capital is taking more income, leaving less to reward good and steady work or generalized benefits to society.
An excessive capital share of income widens the wealth gap, slows wage increases relative to inflation, and can have the effect of divestment from the foundations of shared prosperity. This is why we have seen lower and lower investment in infrastructure miantenance and upgrading in the United States over the last five decades. Financial markets have not made good on the hope that their wealth would turn into replacement funding for needed infrastructure.
Instead, government continues to carry the bulk of the infrastructure funding burden, which means taxpayers do, while capital-intensive industries are granted more and more relief from the burdens of taxation. This is a quadruple shift of value away from households, communities, and small businesses: Income share is shifting, services and infrastructure are underfunded, more of the tax burden is falling on people with fewer resources to spare, and prices are rising.
Financial market data is still treating the value of a specific company or commodity as an opportunity or a risk for individual investors, as if these value considerations could be isolated from all other factors that determine the health and resilience of the everyday economy. The effect is an automatic undervaluing of investment in shared needs and benefits, and an atomization of value creation.
This makes all money across the economy less efficient at creating value. Climate disruption is a leading example:
- Oil and gas companies are making record profits and seeing record valuations in stock market trading.
- Subsidies for oil and gas are surging—having already reached $7 trillion per year in 2022.
- Combustible fuels, traded as international mineral commodities, continue to be a primary means of projecting price increases across the economy.
- The 2022 Global Turning Point report projected that the global costs of climate inaction would reach $178 trillion by 2070.
- As this unfolds, proportional climate risk and cost are spilling into the wider economy, affecting prices and availability of credit and insurance.
The 2024 Food System Economics Commission report found total costs of unsustainable food systems already reach $15.428 trillion per year, or $1 million every 2 seconds—reaching $178 trillion four times faster than the Global Turning Point report predicted. When financial data ignores these hidden costs, it sets in motion losses that can affect everyone in society.
Worse, the incentive to prop up businesses that appear to be high-value ventures because these costs remain hidden, diverts capital to destructive activities and accelerates the depletion of Active Value. Climate risk and resilience costs—including impacts on the productive capacity of agricultural regions and smaller-scale farms—are pushing up prices for goods and services, and infrastructure, across the economy, in every country.
Upstream cities can prosper by protecting downstream landscapes
By using Earth science data to invest for better outcomes across an entire watershed, upstream cities and regions can capture a significant share of resilience capital, and build Active Value economies with support from diverse partners, across sectors and regions.
Investing in adaptation and resilience can create 280 million jobs and trillions of dollars in new economic activity. This is a path to shared prosperity, but resources will only be used efficiently if senseless waste and worsening risk are removed.
The debate about how best to invest for sustainable development, or to mobilize resilience insights, is not a debate between people who care about the environment or social good and those who don’t; it is a debate between a future of enduring prosperity and an alternate future in which prosperity is an obsolete idea.
It will be the cities, communities, industries, and farming regions, that prioritize a shift to sustainability and stewardship, and to wider creation of Active Value that anchor the future of economic prosperity. Identifying those areas of innovation and new investment that shift value-creation back to high Active Value practices should be a priority for every city, region, and enterprise.
