John C. Goodman

John C. Goodman (born 22 May 1946) is president and CEO of the Goodman institute for Public Policy Research, a think tank focused on public policy issues.

Born on May 22, 1946, Goodman grew up in Waco, Texas.

In high school, he won several statewide tournaments.

This experience served him later in life when he became a TV debating partner of conservative polemicist William F. Buckley.

He attended college at the University of Texas in Austin, where he became involved in campus politics and was elected vice president of the student body.

The following year he lost the race for president to Lloyd Doggett, who later served as a senior Democratic member of the House of Representatives.

University of Texas student politics was a training ground for such politicians as Texas governors Allan Shivers and John Connally.

After college, Goodman enrolled in the graduate economics program at Columbia University, where he earned a PhD. He credits his experience with campus politics as vital to shaping his Columbia University dissertation—which used tools of economics to explain political outcomes.

Among the faculty who gave him guidance were three Nobel Prize winners – Robert Mundell, Edmund Phelps and William Vickrey.

Goodman's dissertation was entitled The Market for Coercion: A Neoclassical Theory of the State.

It was in the field of public choice, which merges economics and political science.

As the term "neoclassical" suggests, the dissertation used marginal analysis—which was a radical departure from the voting models favored by public choice theorists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock and their followers, on the one hand, and University of Chicago economist George Stigler's "regulatory capture" theory, on the other.

With his colleague Phil Porter, Goodman published three articles extending the theory to the fields of regulation, the production of public goods, and welfare economics.

Goodman received a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1977 and has taught and done research at Columbia, Stanford, Dartmouth, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Dallas.

He was the founding chief executive of the National Center for Policy Analysis, which operated from 1982 to 2017.

He is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute.

The Wall Street Journal and The National Journal have called Goodman the "father of Health Savings Accounts."

In 1983, he founded the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a think tank that was the source of such policy ideas as Health Savings Accounts, Roth IRAs, automatic employer enrollment in 401(k) plans and allowing seniors to continue working without penalty after they begin receiving Social Security benefits.

Their article on regulation won the prestigious Duncan Black Prize awarded by the Public Choice Society in 1989.

An important issue in public choice economics is whether a stable equilibrium exists.

In traditional voting models it typically does not.

Yet Goodman showed that in a neoclassical model the conditions for stable equilibrium are easy to satisfy.

Three other departures from previous thinking were also important.

Every law and every regulation tends to have winners and losers.

Both groups have a self-interest in either supporting or opposing the change.

However, the passage of a law is a "public good" for those who support it and a "public bad" for those who oppose it.

In either case, individuals benefit from their group's success, whether or not they contribute to the effort.

A well-known proposition in public finance holds that if all behavior is voluntary, public goods will tend to be underproduced.

In politics, this means that the effort groups make to secure political goals will always understate the true value they place on achieving those goals.

The reason is that each individual has an incentive to be a free rider, contributing little or no effort while hoping that others will contribute a lot.

The groups that are most successful in overcoming the free rider problems and securing more effort from their members are the groups that are the most successful in the political system.

Note: an individual may be member of several different groups, including groups that oppose each other.

For example, an auto worker might pay dues to a union that supports higher tariffs on car imports.

In his 2012 book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, Goodman asserts that empowering both patients and caregivers to control healthcare decisions produces greater patient satisfaction at substantially lower costs.

The book emphasizes the importance that patients, payers, and providers each operate according to economic incentives that encourage them consider both the costs and benefits of care, innovate to improve outcomes and lower costs, and provide subsidies that do not arbitrarily benefit one group (like workers at companies that provide insurance) at the expense of other groups (like workers at companies that do not).

He regularly briefs members of Congress on economic policy and testifies before congressional committees.

He is author and co-author of 15 books and more than 50 published studies on such topics as health policy, tax reform and school choice.

He has addressed more than 100 different organizations on public policy issues.

He writes a column for Forbes and an occasional weekend column for Townhall.

He has appeared 23 times on C-Span.