Funny Money

A TENURED PROFESSOR

by John Kenneth Galbraith

Houghton Mifflin

197 pages; $19.95

American economists are writers of humorous fiction, as the U.S.-budget fantasies attest, but John Kenneth Galbraith's droll, mannered novels are funny on purpose. In his first, The McLandress Dimension (1963), the Harvard professor introduced a concept that measured the time -- often a matter of milliseconds -- that public figures spend thinking of matters unrelated to themselves. The new novel, his third, explores the equally valuable IRAT, or Index of Irrational Expectations, a quantification of the collective wrongheadedness of the stock market. Harvard technocrat Montgomery Marvin, known for his seminal study of refrigerator pricing, invents IRAT and becomes exceedingly rich. He thus affronts the self-satisfied Cambridge community, where "no one has ever been known to repeat what he or she has heard at a party, only what he or she has said." This is the mandarin author's slyest satire yet.