Goodman's first non-fiction book, "The Money Game" (1968), was a number one bestseller for over a year and earned him the 1969 Gerald Loeb Special Book Award. In "Paper Money" (1981), he memorably introduced the catchphrase "Assume a can opener" to mock the tendency of economists to make unjustified assumptions and asked "Why are the economists almost always wrong?" During a stint in Hollywood, he wrote screen plays, including that for "The Wheeler Dealers", starring James Garner and Lee Remick, adapted from his novel of the same title.