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 impossibility theorem 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. 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. Groups, not individuals, as the unit of account 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