John Campbell on "Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone"

In Fixed, co-authors John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai diagnose the ills of today’s personal finance markets in the United States 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. Campbell and Ramadorai describe how some even opt out of the financial system altogether, relying on unregulated and often shady mechanisms to implement necessary financial functions, with dire consequences for individuals, families and the economy more broadly.

 

With the explosive growth of the global middle class, longer lifespans and greater numbers of seniors managing their money alone, the pitfalls of personal finance now affect billions of people around the world. Fixed proposes concrete solutions that harness the expertise of economists, the power of government and the speed of technology to restore fairness and trust in our broken system and make it work better for ordinary people.

 

John Campbell is Olshan Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He studied economics at Oxford and Yale and began his post-doctoral career studying asset pricing and portfolio choice before turning his attention to how people actually manage their finances in the real world, giving the field the name Household Finance, now in common usage. He has taught at Harvard for 30 years, and is also the co-founder of Arrowstreet Capital, a Boston-based quantitative asset management firm.