What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics’

Short Url
Updated 23 June 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics’

Author: Terrence Lyons

The book offers insight into a political group, with its origins in a small insurgency in northern Ethiopia, which transformed itself into a party (the EPRDF) with a hierarchy that links even the smallest village in the country to the center.

“The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics” offers a study of legacies of protracted civil war and rebel victory over the government, which continue to shape Ethiopian politics.

Terrence Lyons argues that the very structures that enabled the ruling party to overcome the challenges of a war-to-peace transition are the source of the challenges that it faces now.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fixed’

Updated 22 December 2025
Follow

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fixed’

Authors: John Y. Campbell and Tarun Tamadorai

We interact with the financial system every day, whether taking out or paying off loans, making insurance claims, or simply depositing money into our bank accounts. 

“Fixed” exposes how this system has been corrupted to serve the interests of financial services providers and their cleverest customers—at the expense of ordinary people.

John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai diagnose the ills of today’s personal finance markets in the US and across the globe, looking at everything from short-term saving and borrowing to loans for education and housing, financial products for retirement, and insurance. 

They show how the system is “fixed” to benefit those who are wealthy and more educated while encouraging financial mistakes by those who are aren’t, making it difficult for regular consumers to make sound financial decisions and disadvantaging them in some of the most consequential economic transactions of their lives.