Author: Nemo Semeret

Check your ideology at the door Perhaps the biggest economic topic in Ethiopia today is foreign currency. Sadly, much of the discussion around it is low quality. Instead of reasoning from first principles, people drown in jargon and misunderstood theories: inflation, socialism, neoliberalism, colonialism, IMF, China, bla bla bla. Whether the motivations are naivete or special interests, the result is many strongly held but incoherent beliefs. To navigate this, let’s be guided by this (perhaps apocryphal) quote from the great physicist Richard Feynman: “If you can’t explain something to a child, there’s a chance you don’t understand it well”. So don’t let any…