A Tenured Professor, John Kenneth Galbraith
Possibly a
roman à clef, but I haven't looked up who is our
Princess. It's about an economics professor with a scheme (to calculate
irrationality in the markets) that's good enough to make money by
speculation instead of publication; he does make a pile, but the
indignation of the irrational reels him back in after a while. (Lovely set
piece of Senators huffing about how un-American it is to bet against the
market.) Maybe Galbraith just wondered what would happen if a fairly normal
person, someone with no urge for a Batcave or polar mansion or world
domination, had such a power.
So wrote clew in
Fiction (20th c.).