> He's actually some kind of mathematician. I can't evaluate his work
>
> in that field.
I put him in the category of a cheap ideologue and -- if guilt by association holds to any degree -- a dick.
I read selected passages of his intermediate micro textbook. And, the first chapters of his armchair economist. At first sight, it may fall in the same category as freakonomics, but it's not nearly as serious. Dubner and Levitt developed relatively sophisticated theories (models) to rationalize actual (and I'd even say interesting) data from the real world. In spite of the derisive comments I've read about freakonomics on PEN-L, the issues of abortion, crime rates, drug dealing, and the decay of the KKK in the South, are much more serious than continue to argue that taxes are bad because they lead to allocational inefficiency and crap. Moreover, Dubner and Levitt actually wrote more rigorous empirical papers and published them, before they popularized that content in freakonomics. So, whatever we may think of freakonomics, the content of the book is backed up by serious work. The papers actually exist. I'm yet to see a single original peer-reviewed paper written by this guy, Landsberg. His armchair economist is ideological pontificating. Vulgar, silly stuff.
And so are his Slate articles.
The guilt by association comes from Landsberg being good friends with Kenneth McLaughlin, my ex teacher of advanced micro at the GC (he's actually affiliated with Hunter), a relatively recent Chicago Ph D, insecure and incompetent as an instructor, a true jerk if you'll ever find one in academia. (He was so Chicago-style intellectual-property protective of his stupid class notes, all refried beans drawn from textbooks and journal articles with a negative amount of original material, that we students had to apply for a password to view them online and -- I'm not exaggerating -- vow not to disclose them to others, right at the time when the MIT was making all its courseware freely available on the web.)
My other advanced micro professor was Michael Grossman, who also heads the health economics program at the NBER, from Columbia, where he worked under Gary Becker. Mike has a grumpy New York City type demeanor, ironic and self-deprecating, rather conventional (but proficient) in his empirical approach, fairly open-minded, and *extremely supportive* of his students. What a contrast!