Neva Goodwin

Scholarship

Goodwin is active in a variety of attempts to systematize and institutionalize an economic theory – “contextual economics” – that will have more relevance to contemporary real-world social and ecological concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm, along with university-level curriculum for these approaches and results, and action and policy to implement these understandings. Her work ranges across climate change, labor relations, and feminist economics (where she helped develop the notion of the Core sphere of production). She also seeks a deeper theoretic understanding from exposure to on-the-ground experiments in alternative socio-economic institutional design.

She is the lead author of two introductory college-level textbooks: Microeconomics in Context and Macroeconomics in Context, published by M.E. Sharpe and then Routledge. She is also the editor of two six-part book series: Evolving Values for a Capitalist World (University of Michigan Press), and Frontier Thinking in Economic Thought (Island Press).

She is currently on the editorial board of Schmollers Jahrbuch, Journal of Contextual Economics.

Goodwin’s work has been published in various peer-reviewed journals and periodicals, including Real-World Economics Review (previously post-autistic economics review), Our Planet: The Magazine of the United Nations Environment Programme, Forum for Social Economics, Growing the Economy through Global Warming Solutions (a series published by the Civil Society Institute), Opinion Sur, Online Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics (published by the International Society for Ecological Economics), the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, Review of Radical Political Economics, Voprosy Ekonomiki [Economic Questions], Ecological Economics, Green China Magazine, World Development (editing a special edition), and The Harvard Business Review. Her work has also appeared in several edited compilations. GDAE also hosts several of her working papers.

Her work has been reviewed in the Review of Radical Political Economics, Management Revue, Journal of Economic IssuesInternational Labour Review, The Journal of Consumer Affairs, The Journal of Environment & Development, Southern Economic Journal, The Economic Journal.

She has lectured widely, including at the Club of Rome and The Smithsonian Institution Grand Challenges Consortia; MIT; Thirtieth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures; New School For Social Research; University of Utah; the Kennedy School of Government; the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; the Cambridge Forum; Environmental Grantmakers Association; the University of Moscow; the University of Cambridge; the EPA; the Russian Society for Ecological Economics; the American Economic Association; Socially Responsible Investing (SRI in the Rockies); the American Association of Legal Scholars; the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics (keynote address); the Eastern Economics Association; the Atlantic International Economic Society; the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (keynote address); the Boston Theological Institute in conjunction with The American Association for the Advancement of Science; the UN Development Program; the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics; and the World Institute for International Development, Helsinki.

Goodwin has helped arrange a variety of conferences, seminars, and symposia at Pocantico Conference Center, Tufts University, Harvard University, Boston University and elsewhere, and with the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Richard Lounsbery Foundation, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Center for International Development at Harvard University (then, the Harvard Institute for International Development), Hewlett Foundation, and more.

Goodwin is also director of a project that has developed a "Social Science Library: Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being." Containing a bibliography of more than 9,000 titles, including full text PDFs of about a third of these, this material will be sent on USB drives or CDs to all university libraries in 137 developing countries.

Public activity

Goodwin is currently on the Board of Advisors at Sustainable Endowments Institute; and the President of the Mount Desert Land and Garden Preserve.

Goodwin has previously worked with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET); Ceres (Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economy; on their Board of Directors); College of the Atlantic; Bar Harbor, ME (as the vice-chair of the Board); the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (as a trustee, and then vice- chair of the Board); the Human Development and Capability Association (as a Founding Fellow); the International Society for Ecological Economics; Washington, D.C., President's Council on Sustainable Development; Task Force on Population & Consumption; U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration; the Committee for the Political Economy of the Good Society (PEGS; as a founding board member); the World Bank; the International Center for Research on Women, Washington, D.C. (as a trustee, and committee chair); Technology + Economics consulting firm; the New Community Development Corporation, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); and the Boston Society of Architects.

Goodwin was also active in organizing her family to attempt to reason with the present and former CEOs of ExxonMobil regarding climate change, directly and through shareholder resolutions. The family had some success in persuading the company to reduce its public stance of ridiculing the science of climate change.

Early life and family

Goodwin attended the Chapin School in New York and graduated from Concord Academy, Class of 1962.

Goodwin received an A.B. in English Literature; Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College, Class of 1966. Her senior thesis, “The Deciphered Heart: A Study of Conrad Aiken's Poetry and Prose Fiction,” was published in full in the 75th Anniversary Year edition of the Sewanee Review the following summer, under the pen-name Jennifer Aldrich.

After working closely with Buckminster Fuller for seven years to establish and organize the Design Science Institute (now the Buckminster Fuller Institute), and then for a couple of years as a consultant, she returned to academia to receive a MPA from Harvard Kennedy School (’82) and a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University (’87). Her dissertation, Back to the Fork: What We Have Derived from Marshallian Economics and what We Might Have Derived, became her first book in 1991: Social Economics: An Alternative Theory: Building Anew on Marshall’s Principles . While a student at BU, she co-taught courses with S. M. Miller and Paul Streeten, and was a Research Associate and Coordinator of the Global Issues Program at BU’s World Development Institute, as well as the Director of Program Development at The African Studies Center.

Goodwin was also Visiting Fellow at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University in Helsinki, and a Research Associate at the Instituto Interamericano De Cooperacion Para La Agricultura (IICA), Buenos, Aires, Argentina, before moving to Tufts University in 1991.

Goodwin is the widow of Bruce Mazlish and is the mother of two and grandmother of three. She is an avid photographer, especially of lichens.

Goodwin is a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller family. She is the third child of David Rockefeller and Margaret McGrath, along with siblings David, Abby, Peggy, Richard, and Eileen. "Goodwin" is originally her middle name, after an ancestor on her mother’s side (no relation to other Goodwin economists).

Selected Articles

NB: Most of these are also gathered on Goodwin's ResearchGate profile.

Working Papers and Lectures