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George J. W. Goodman, who demystified financial complexities in best-selling books and on a long-running public television program under the name of one of history's most famous economists, Adam Smith, died on Friday in Miami. He was 83.

The cause was complications of leukemia, his son, Mark, said.

Mr. Goodman helped start Institutional Investor magazine in the 1960s. He was executive editor of Esquire in the 1970s. He wrote novels, nonfiction books and a popular children's book. But he was probably best known as the amiable but intellectually rigorous host of "Adam Smith's Money World," seen on PBS from 1984 to 1997.

Mr. Goodman did not choose the pseudonym Adam Smith, after the 18th-century philosopher who shaped the discipline of economics with his concept of an "invisible hand" that governed markets. Rather, it was given to him as a young journalist for New York magazine in the 1960s, to hide his identity from sensitive Wall Street sources.

He hated the name at first and tried to change it, but he could not find out who had bestowed it, although many sources said it was Clay Felker, New York magazine's founding editor.

"Of course, after my books became successful, three people owned up," Mr. Goodman said in an interview with The New York Times in 1981.

His first book as Adam Smith, "The Money Game," published in the spring of 1968, became an immediate best seller and remained one for the rest of the year. In it, he posited that the machinations of money were high drama, understandable to the lay reader and, perhaps most important to the book's success, humorous. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post both lauded it as a masterly exposition of mass psychology.

Mr. Goodman followed up with more books about economics, including "Supermoney" (1972) and "Paper Money" (1981). In "Paper Money," he made a joke about economists' jargon that became famous in and out of the field: Stuck without tools on a desert island, an economist theorizes, "Assume a can opener."

In 1985, as "Adam Smith's Money World" was beginning its run, Mr. Goodman told United Press International that the show was about money, not economics. "Everybody's interested in money," he said. "Money, food and sex, not necessarily in that order."

He continued, "As my Texas friends say, 'Money ain't everything, but everything won't go out with you unless you've got it.' "

George Jerome Waldo Goodman was born in Clayton, Mo., on Aug. 10, 1930. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, then studied political economy at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He served in the Army as an intelligence analyst in the mid-1950s, then wrote about various topics for Barron's, Time, Fortune and other magazines. His passion in the 1950s was writing novels.

His first was "The Bubble Makers" (1955), a story of conflict between a Harvard student and his wealthy grandfather. He had written it instead of a thesis at Oxford. Three subsequent novels were well received, with critics particularly complimentary about their dialogue.

Mr. Goodman's fourth novel, "The Wheeler Dealers" (1959), about the pyrotechnics between a Texas oil baron and a female broker, was made into a movie in 1963 starring James Garner and Lee Remick. Mr. Goodman wrote the screenplay.

But he soon began focusing on economic matters, an interest he had demonstrated with his satirical treatment of upper-class characters in his novels. "I was curious to know why some people make money and others don't," he told Lear's magazine in 1989.

He began managing what he told U.P.I. was "a small, aggressive mutual fund," started a regular financial feature in New York magazine and helped found The Institutional Investor. As his economics books succeeded, he turned to television, where he employed graphics, interviews and even cartoons to clarify financial issues. "Adam Smith's Money World" was broadcast in 40 countries.

But the best part of "Adam Smith's Money World," John Corry wrote in The Times in 1984, was Mr. Goodman's commentary. Mr. Goodman, he suggested, should spend more time "interviewing himself."

Mr. Goodman's wife, the former Sallie Brophy, died in 2007. In addition to his son, he is survived by his daughter, Susannah Goodman; his partner, Lynda Richards; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Goodman said his most widely read work may have been "Bascombe, the Fastest Hound Alive," a children's book he published in 1958. But it was his ability to evoke an emotional response to economic phenomenon that most defined his impact.

"We are at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air," he wrote of a high-flying stock market in "The Money Game."

"We know at some moment the black horsemen will come shattering through the terrace doors wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors," he continued. "Those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time. So everybody keeps asking — what time is it? But none of the clocks have hands."