SubscribeThe Adam Smith - George Goodman Connection
The contemporary Adam Smith did not choose the name Adam Smith.
In fact, when the name of the 1776 Adam Smith was placed on an article he wrote in New York magazine in 1966, he objected strenuously, because the eighteenth century Adam Smith was still a point of reference, frequently with a political connatation. George J. W. Goodman explained, in the very first pages of his #1 best seller, The Money Game, that he had another pseudonym on the article, but Adam Smith stuck. It stayed through five best selling books, and a pioneering weekly PBS television show, “Adam Smith’s Money World,” which won more Emmys than any other show in its category. It stayed through thirty years of book reviews for The New York Times, and several other television venues. Ironically, in 1995 Goodman trademarked the name Adam Smith. The U. S. Department of Commerce granted the trademark because of the long association, and Goodman still holds it.
Here is the context for the association of George Goodman and Adam Smith.
In the fall of 1966, Goodman had published–under his own name–a number of magazine articles, three novels, a spy thriller, and a children’s book. All of his novels received good reviews. John K. Hutchens wrote in The New York Herald Tribune that Goodman was “a bright talent” and “a fresh voice.”
Fascinated with the stock market, Goodman wored first, as a financial reporter, then as a securities analyst and portfolio manager. The road trips for his job gave him the idea for his comedy, “The Wheeler Dealers,” in which a Yale man resident in Texas pretends to be a bona fide Texan for his business presentations, and meets a pretty Wall Street analyst. MGM bought the rights to the movie, Goodman wrote the screenplay, and the film opened at Radio City Music Hall, with James Garner and Lee Remick in the starring roles. Goodman continued at MGM with a draft of another James Garner movie, “The Americanization of Emily.”
Goodman had graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude, and had served on the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and wrote a novel there, published by Viking Press in 1955 as “The Bubble Makers.” During the mid 1950s, the draft continued in force, so Goodman volunteered for the Army, and was ordered to the First Special Forces Group. He wrote about special forces throughout his magazine career. In his brief screenwriting career, he was sent by Columbia Pictures to Viet Nam to research a cilm on special forces, another version of which was called “Green Beret,” with John Wayne. Goodman disclaimed any association.
The Wall Street to which Goodman returned after the Army had the atmosphere of pin-striped suits, privilege, and was nearly all male. (Thus,. having a woman analyst could be considered a source of comedy). The assumption on Wall Street was that the stewardship of wealth was a very serious business. The steward was guided by the “prudent man” rule established in 1830, tha the fiduciary act as wold any prudent man. It was also assumed that investors were rational, and based their market decisions on rational calculations of risk.
This did not fit Goodman’s perceptions of his surroundings and his contemporaries. He published a serious article on the trend toward “performance,” as it was then called, the hunger for immediate gains. He called the fund managers who traded for quick profits, “gunslingers,” a colloquial phrase which made its way into the language. Goodman was approached by Gilberg Kaplan with the dummy for a new magazine, to be called The Institutitional Investor, and became the charter editor. The first issue bore the dummy cover, very traditional, a trader on the stock exchange floor. But with the cover of the second issue, Goodman created at least a moderate revolution. He dressed four leading contemporary money managers as comic strip heroes–Batman, Superman, Captain Marvel, and a generic figure–and called the activities of performance funds speculation. Performance funds concentrated on fewer stocks, turned over faster, and represented a departure from the traditional funds run by the “pleasant, silver haired gnetlemen who bought stock and put it away.” Wall Street could not help but take notice. The stewards of wealth and not been dressed as Batman and Superman with such irony. Institutional Investor was on the map.
At the same time, New York magazine was a special Sunday section of the World Journal Tribune, the successor to the Herald Tribune. It already had a distinct voice. Tom Wolfe had shed his original name, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, and brought bold innovations in style, tone, observation, and punctuation. Jimmy Breslin was reporting, colloquially, from the bars of Queens. Gloria Steinem had already worked as a Playboy bunny to research that phenomenon. Caly Felker, the pioneering editor, sought Goodman as a Wall Street commentator, but Goodman was reluctant. He was still a member of The New York Society of Security Analysts, and he did not want to compromise his sources. Goodman and Felker agreed that he would write under a pseudonym, in the style of British publications such as The Economist and The Financial Times, where Lex and Bagehot and Justinian are well known pseudonyms. They agreed on Procrustes, the mythological innkeeper who hosted his guests with a bed of gold, and cut them to fit it. Goodman wrote his first article, “The Day They Red Dogged Motorola,” about an analyt’s meeting. After his manuscript was set in type, an editor at the magazine–each one denied it–changed “Procrustes” to “Adam Smith”–with quotation marks, to show it was a joke. Goodman was furious; the 1776 author of “The Wealth of Nations” was a moral philosopher some of whose examples became political cliches.
But “Adam Smith” was a sensation, especially on Wall Street. Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gloria Steinem, and Goodman became charter sharedholers of New York magazine, when it emerged as an independent entity, along with its leaders, editor Clay Felker and art director Milton Glaser. “Adam Smith,” influenced somewhat by Wolfe and Breslin, wrote in the looser, metaphoric style of the magazine, but with his own tone and scholarship, and evolved from George J. W. Goodman, reporting not just on the go-go years of Wall Street in the 60s, but in his own interest in behavior and psychology. On the first page of “The Money Game,” in 1968, Goodman wrote, “this is a book about image and reality and identity and anxiety and money.” He brought the image/reality, aidentity/anxiety ideas into the common vernacular of the financial community. “It was a revolution,” wrote Theodore H. White, in In Search of History. Numbers suggested hard, finite fact, Goodman wrote, but the person looking at the numbers acted from his own personality traits. “If you don’t know who you are,” he wrote, “this is an expensive place to find out.” Were investors unable to separate their own past actions from the world theyu sought to perceive? “The stock doesn’t know you own it,” Goodman wrote, another aphorism that is still widely quoted. Could past actions predict the future–could patterns be discerned in charts and “technical analysis?” Goodman wrote, “a stock is going up as long as it’s going up,” which was not as simple as it first appeared.
The Money Game rose rapidly on the best seller charts. It was the #1 best seller for the better part of a year, stayed on the best seller list for over a year, and was translated into thirty languages. For most of that time, the identity of “Adam Smith” was known only to the people whom Goodman dealt with. The secret was kept until Goodman entertained a friend, Henry Raymont, at his house in Princeton. Thinking Raymont was as discreet as his other friends, Goodman told amusing stories. Raymont was a New York Times reporter, and shortly after the weekend, wrote a story in the Times entitled, “Adam Smith Doffs His Mask.” Goodman and Raymont never spoke again. Time, Newsweek, and other publications followed The New York Times.
The title, “The Money Game,” came from Lord Keynes, who had written, “the game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct, whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll.” Paul Samuelson, the MIT professor who was America’s first Nobel Prize winner in economics, wrote, of “The Money Game,” in “Readings in Economics,” his enormously popular readings for his introductory textbook, “this is a modern classic.”
Goodman was executive vice president of Institutional Investor when the company had a public offering in 1969. In 1971, he sold his stock to Kaplan, and wrote Supermoney, the bear market successor to The Money Game, the book which introduced Warren Buffett to the world. (Supermoney appears currently in the Investment Classic series published by John Wiley and Sons). The origianl Random House edition of Supermoney was also a best seller, briefly, another #1 best seller. Goodman continued to write the “American Diary” column in New York magazine, explored his continuing interest in psychology in articles for Psychology Today and Sports Illustrated, and signed a contract with Random House to do a third Adam Smith book. But as he got deeper into academic journals, it occured to him that Adam Smith might not be the right author for such a book.
He had a meeting with James Silberman, his editor at Random House, and Robert Bernstein, the publisher. He suggested he go back to his own name. That was impossible, he was told.
“Adam Smith has written two #1 best sellers,” he was told. “You have not. Random House has worked hard to support the momentum of Adam Smith, with a lot of money in advertising and promotion. The brand is established. If your name is Kleenex, you don’t change your name.”
Powers of Mind, published in 1975, was a book club selection, under the name Adam Smith, but not a best seller to the same degree as the financial Adam Smith books.
When Rupert Murdoch led a successful raid on The New York Magazine Company and took it over, the staff members left. Goodman accepted an appointment to The Editorial Board of The New York Times. He left to write on the beginnings of OPEC, the Arab oil embargo, and the consequences of the transfer of wealth to the Middle East. Two successive covers of The Atlantic Monthly introduced the book, published as Paper Money, in 1981. Paper Money was another book club suggestion, and rose to #5 on The New York Times best seller list.
Goodman was a charter commentator on the PBS program, The Nightly Business Report, and the narrator of several television specials on international economic themes. In 1983, he put together a proposal for a new weekly television program on PBS, “Adam Smith’s Money World.” The first broadcast was in September 1984, and gained an immediate audience. The program had a different appearance that others in the field. To illustrate abstract economic ideas, Goodman and his producers used cartoon techniques from the computer program Paint Box, which gave the program the same metaphoric flavor that his writing displayed. It was allso different in that Goodman, as the host, did not stay in the studio asking questions about the direction of the market. He took the show on the road each week, shooting as a documentary, and fully edited–a process not seen currently in cable financial television. Even in its first year, “Adam Smith’s Money World,” won an Wmmy for his graphic design, and Goodman won an Emmy nomination as Outstanding Interviewer. The next year, Goodman took his crew to China for a prime time PBS special on the new developements in that Communist country. Called “From Marx to Mastercard,” it had of necessity a Chinese partner, CCTV, which reported that in the broadcast on November 9, 1985, it had an audience of three hundred forty million. Goodman subsequently pointed out there were only two national channels at the time, and nothing of interest on the other. “From Marx to Mastercard” was the first of five such China specials, tracking the development of capitalism in that country. In 2000, Goodman’s “China Crossroads,” done by Adam Smith Global Television, a successor company, won a gold medal in the documentary division of the Houston International Film Festival.
In 1990, with his traveling crew in Poland and Hungary, Goodman met a Russian television producer, Vladimir Lebed, who proposed that “Adam Smith’s Money World” appear on Russian television with a sound track in Russian. In the atmosphere at the time, of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika–openness–the Russian television networks were eager for programming, especially something that would tell them about life in the West under capitalism. “Mir Finansov” (Financial World)was given a prime time slot–8 pm on Mondays–and won a wide audience as the Russians scrambled to adapt to a post-Communist regime. Goodman took his crew to Russia the first year he was on the air there, and got one of the first substantial interviews with Mikhail Gorbachev. He returned to do a special program with Gorbachev in 1993, met the future Russian leaders, and Russian oligarchs, at a Davos meeting in 1996, and produced “Russia: Threat or Promise?” in 1991, another PBS special, which also won a gold medal at The Houston International Film Festival.
In the mid 1990s, Goodman began a collaboration with Financial Times Television, a division of the British newspaper which is no longer active but was then worldwide. Goodman’s lawyers suggested that, vis-a-vis the broad worldwide audience that was planned, he had better trademark the name Adam Smith. The U S Department of Commerce, recognizing the long use in commerce of the name, granted two trademarks, one for the name itself, and the other for the stylized logo of the two words, “Adam Smith,” used in both print and television.
In 1997, the longtime prime funder of the Adam Smith series, MetLife, decided to reallocate the funds, but asked Goodman to become a director of New England Life Insurance, and later of the Metlife Directors Advisory Board. Goodman had also served as a director of Hyatt Hotels, USAirways, the biochemical company Cambrex, and several smaller entities. Goodman then turned exclusively to international programs, with Adam Smith Global Television, his own company, as producer.
During the 14 year run of the weekly “Adam Smith’s Money World,” Goodman brought Warren Buffett to television for the first time, and did four subsequent programs about him. He also brought in each Treasury Secretary, various business leaders, and the heads of several dozen foreign countries.
In 1995, Goodman won an Emmy as Best Interviewer for an unusual program, “The Old Masters,” about the Wall Streeters who continued to work into their 90s.
When “The Money Game” first appeared, The Wall Street Journal ran a front page news story with the headline “New Book That Views Market as Irrational Is Hit on Wall Street.” But by the mid 1990s, Goodman noted, two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, had published in academic journals and in the economic journal Econometrica, examples of irrational behavior in market situtations, using academic quantitative techniques. Also in the 1990s, Robert Shiller published Irrational Exuberance. Kahneman, in 2002, was awarded the Nobel Prize, not in psychology but in economics. The ideas sketched in The Money Game anecdotally, a generation later, did not seem so radical.
A long time member of the Advisory Board of the economics deparmtent of Princeton University, in 1990 Goodman became a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for International Studies at Princeton. Its director, Professor Michael Doyle, suggested that Goodman bring in clips from international shows and talk about them in an open lecture. The series was very popular, and in 2003 became The Goodman Lectures in Media and Global Affairs, under the cosponsorship of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.
Of Adam Smith, Goodman wrote to a Harvard reunion, “Though I read him at Harvard, I had no particularly affinity then to the 18th century Scot. At one time, the use of a pseudonym enabled me to switch gears in my writing style. None of us, I sometimes think, choose the names we are born with, and we learn to accept the hand that has been dealt us but I doubt that the 1776 Adam Smith would have liked seeing the name on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, saying “New Book That Views Market As Irrational Is A Hit on Wall Street.”
