The Tenured Professor - Hardcover

John Kenneth Galbraith who was born in 1908, is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and a past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the distinguished author of thirty-one books spanning three decades, including The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash. He has been awarded honorary degrees from Harvard, Oxford, the University of Paris, and Moscow University, and in 1997 he was inducted into the Order of Canada and received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2000, at a White House ceremony, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Twenty years have elapsed since the celebrated Harvard economist's last novel ( The Triumph ) but this succinct parable for our times, a rare comedy of point and precision, is well worth the wait. Harvard professor Montgomery Marvin, a clever, mild-mannered economist whose Ph.D thesis examined arcane aspects of refrigerator pricing, devises an approach to economics that he calls the Index of Irrational Expectations, based on the all-too-apparent notion that there is no limit to human folly when greed is the driving force. Buying stocks of irrationally inflated companies short, selling while the price is still high and replacing them cheap when the inevitable decline comes, Marvin and wife Marjie soon amass a fortune. Liberals at heart, they spend the money by endowing peace professorships at military schools and establishing countervailing PACs--money to support candidates for office opposing those helped by wealthy lobbyists. Only when they buy a major arms manufacturer and turn its efforts to peaceful purposes does the sacred defense establishment turn on them. This rueful tale is embellished with countless delightful asides on matters as various as Harvard academic manners and the proper behavior before Congressional committees.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.