A Tenured Professor- - - - This is apparently John Kenneth Galbraith's third novel. I enjoyed Galbraith's non-fiction books The Affluent Society and The Great Crash. However, this novel is fairly atrocious. It appears to be Galbraith's idea of an escapist wish-fulfillment fantasy. The protagonist is a bright young economist. He gets his undergrad degree at Harvard, then he gets a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge. Should he perhaps go to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D.? No. He goes to Berkeley instead. Where he writes a successful thesis. And then is offered a full-time teaching post, with the first year off for research. Eventually, he gets tenure at Harvard. (Only another academic could imagine this was a gripping tale...) Along the way he marries a girl who is "exuberant" in bed, and who is brilliant, but not quite as brilliant as he is, and who inherits a considerable sum of money. He comes up with a formula for identifying irrationally overvalued stocks and sells them short. They become enormously rich and use their wealth to support various liberal causes. That's it. That's the book. It manages to be a quick read (197 pages) but also rather dull. Galbraith tends to end each chapter with an ominous threat of something about to happen ("Of this [serious and highly unwelcome trouble] there would now be some indication") but these threats generally remain unfulfilled. I felt that both the politics and the economics in the book were rather naive. You would think that an esteemed economist, who among other things wrote a book on the 1929 stockmarket crash, might recognize that identifying irrationally overvalued stocks is easy. In order to make large amounts of money from the crash, you really need to know exactly when the euphoria will end, which is much harder. |