THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510190588
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
There was a time when I shared the misguided notion of some that economics is a dull subject. I can still recall a stiff British literary competition for ``The World's Most Boring Headline.'' The victor escapes me, but I well remember the runner-up:
``Economist Dies.''
Travis McGee's cerebral but beach party-going pal, Meyer, managed to turn my prejudice around somewhat. Globe-trotting Old Dominion University economist and president James Koch and Virginia Wesleyan's Dave Garraty, who produces the revealing monthly Hampton Roads Economic Performance Index, also influenced me. When he is not teaching, Garraty plays guitar in a Currituck bluegrass band.
Now confirming my renewed interest in economics is a series of urbane murder mysteries written by economists, starring an economist and solved by economic theory.
These thrillers, credited to the pseudonymous ``Marshall Jevons,'' are at once droll and cost-effective. The name is an amalgam of monikers from famed economists Alfred Marshall and William Jevons. The actual authors are collaborating economics professors Kenneth G. Elzinga, 53, of the University of Virginia, and William Breit, 63, of Trinity University, San Antonio.
Their latest, A Deadly Indifference (Carroll & Graf, 179 pp., $19.95), is, to employ detective parlance, a case in point. By page 15 Chicago entrepreneur Morris Fain, headed blissfully down the English River Cam in a rented boat, is narrowly missed by a 25-pound iron dumbbell dropped from a great height. One could regard this abortive disaster as an authentic boom-or-bust situation.
There's more to come, notably two murders and no end of unscrupulous insider finagling. At length all is explained by short, bald, professorial sleuth Henry Spearman, who bears more than a passing resemblance to cherubic Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Here he announces the killer over brandy and port in the Senior Common Room at Cambridge:
``I am well aware of the divisions that exist at Cambridge University. I have no doubt that they are deep and real. But I dismissed free market economists as suspects in Nigel Hart's death for the very same reason I would dismiss Marxo-Keynesians.
``Neither side had anything to gain.''
Employing the Theory of Asymmetric Information, Spearman ultimately fingers the offender.
``Look,'' maintains the fiscally responsible ferret, ``you have to remember that the key to analyzing these problems is not scrutinizing motives - that's where the police often go wrong - but scrutinizing gains and losses.''
Simple enough.
Now you try it.
A Deadly Indifference is the collaborating professors' third Henry Spearman novel, after Murder at the Margin (1978) and The Fatal Equilibrium (1986). Indifference is a prequel. Set in 1965, it provides Spearman with prophet status for predicting the fall of Communism in a lecture at the Darwin Theater, Cambridge:
``What matters is whether an economic system has institutions that channel human beings in directions that are productive and satisfy their own desire to, as Adam Smith put it, `better their condition.' Because Communism does not meet this criterion, its future is bleak indeed.''
It was curtains, Comrade.
``Working with Bill is still fun,'' reports Elzinga from his quarters at the Pavilion on the Lawn at U.Va. He was invited by the Board of Visitors to reside there after winning the Cavaliers Distinguished Teaching Professor award some years back.
``I'll go to San Antonio or he'll come here or we'll meet somewhere,'' Elzinga said of their collaborative method,'' and we write, sentence by sentence, together.''
The sentences and notices have been uniformly good; all the Spearman books remain in print. But the praise the authors most prize came from Milton Friedman's secretary at Stanford University. She said they really captured her boss.
I couldn't resist asking Elzinga, who lectures routinely to rapt classes of 500 students, what the future might be for the American economy.
His response was definitive:
``I don't know,'' he said.
Economist lives. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB