Richard M. Goodwin

Richard M. Goodwin (February 24, 1913 – August 13, 1996) was an American mathematician and economist. He was born in New Castle, Indiana.

Goodwin received his BA and PhD at Harvard, and he taught there from 1942 until 1950. He taught at the University of Cambridge until 1979 and the University of Siena until 1984. He was the first non-Italian professor of economics at Siena. He described himself as "a lifelong but wayward Marxist", joining the Communist Party of Great Britain while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the 1930s, and then its American counterpart when he got back to the States. He left after the announcement of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Goodwin worked on the interaction between long run growth and business cycles. His article on "matrix multiplier" was one of the earliest uses of the Perron–Frobenius theorem in economics, although his reasoning had an error that was diagnosed by Frank H. Hahn. He returned to the Perron–Frobenius theorem with his book on The dynamics of a capitalist economy.

Goodwin adopted the Lotka–Volterra equations for the population dynamics of a predator and prey species as a persistent model of economic growth, called the "Goodwin model" (or "Goodwin's Class-Struggle Model"). In his model, employed workers have the role of predators, as their wage demands squeeze profits and hence investment, leading to an increase in unemployment. Another model, "Goodwin's Non-Linear Accelerator", is also a model of endogenous cycles in economic activity; the cycles do not rely on outside shocks or structurally unstable parameters. "A Growth Cycle" (1967) saw Goodwin utilise Volterra's equations to formalise Marx's theory of economic cycles.

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