A TENURED PROFESSOR by John Kenneth...

A TENURED PROFESSOR by John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin: $7.95). This tongue-in-cheek novel by the noted liberal economist offers an amusing contrast to Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” as a satire of Reagan-era greed and financial malfeasance. While researching such famous scams as the South Sea Bubble, Montgomery Marvin, a professor of economics at Harvard, discovers a significant, recurring theme: “Inherent in the economic system was the tendency of people who were presumptively sane to be captured by euphoria, to be guided not by reality but by what served their own superbly conditioned hopes.” Marvin devises a way of calculating the unjustified optimism within a specific company to arrive at its Index of Irrational Expectations (IRAT); buying and selling against that trend enables him to amass a staggering fortune in the stock market. But the un-American notion of profiting from pessimism--and Marvin’s efforts to translate his liberal philosophy into an attack on the Political-Action-Committee system of Congressional fund raising--bring the wrath of the U.S. government down upon him. Galbraith tucks an obvious moral into his pleasantly stuffy comedy of economic matters.