The Cedrunomist

  Executive Summary:  Most people assume poverty causes crime. Gary Becker’s 1968 economic model of crime offers a different explanation. People commit crimes the same way they make any economic decision, by weighing expected benefits against expected costs. When you apply Becker’s four variables to petty and white collar crime in India, something uncomfortable emerges. The numbers have been pointing in one direction for a very long time. The Parking Lot That Started It All Gary Becker was late for an exam at the University of Columbia and had to decide quickly whether to pay for a parking or risk a fine by parking illegally on the street. He did the mental arithmetic in thirty seconds, parked illegally, and made his exam on time. Then he went on to win a Nobel Prize partly by writing down that thirty-second calculation as a formal economic model of crime. Becker’s insight, published in 1968, was simple and scandalous in equal measure. People commit crimes the same way they ma...

The Old Consensus is Cracking For almost two decades, markets worshipped asset-light businesses. Software, platforms and digital networks dominated capital allocation because investors believed the future belonged to companies that could scale without factories, mines, pipelines or ports, and that consensus is now cracking. A new investment framework is emerging on Wall Street; It is called HALO - Heavy Assets, Low Obsolescence. The idea is simple: in a world shaped by AI, geopolitical fragmentation and supply-chain insecurity, the winners may increasingly be companies that own hard physical assets that cannot be disrupted or digitally replicated. The AI Paradox Here is the irony: the AI boom itself is accelerating this shift. Artificial intelligence does not float in the cloud; it requires electricity, copper, rare earths, water, semiconductors, cement, data centres and transmission infrastructure. The digital economy is discovering it’s becoming physical. McKinsey estimates that prod...

Executive Summary In 1983, psychologist Dan Kiley identified what he called the Peter Pan Syndrome: a tendency among adults to avoid responsibility, fear commitment, and retreat into escapism rather than engage with the demands of adult life. Though he treated it as a personal failing, it has become a generational characteristic. A large cohort of educated, urban professionals in the United States has opted out of traditional adulthood, and the consequences for cities, fiscal systems, and labour markets are becoming difficult to ignore. India is at an earlier point in this story, and that is precisely the right time to pay attention. On a Generation That Stayed Young For a period around 2014, San Francisco was where a generation of ambitious professionals arrived, prospered, and collectively decided that growing up was optional. Those same professionals are now in their late thirties and forties, and the city has aged alongside them because a city that does not produce children or fill...