Sam’s Links: July Edition – Econlib

Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog , he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for June.

Blogs and short links

1. From Henry Oliver: The idea that studying English literature is particularly good preparation for becoming prime minister is ludicrous.

2. Patrick Collison glimpsing at Hibernofuturism.

3. José Luis Ricón on Claude’s constitution. There are also his links. Read on for controversies about whether worms can acquire memories by eating other worms (!).

4. There are many well-documented issues with Goodreads, but at a philosophical level, perhaps the biggest one is that it gives blanket recommendations which implicitly assume that the “average reader” is a useful object. I simply do not care that Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker is in the top 5% of ratings. In an attempt to fix this, Mark Greville has created BookTribes, which recommends books based on your taste similarity to other users rather than popularity.

5. Congratulations also on the launch of the Arq Foundation, a new think tank in Brussels to prepare Europe for transformative AI.

6. The latest in “unexpected Timothy Williamson”. Someone should send Ava a copy of the Timothy Williamson crochet puppet.

7. I am sometimes asked whether there is a canonical book about the Irish housing crisis, or at least one that isn’t festooned with economic illiteracy. As far as I can tell, the answer is no. However, I anticipate that situation will be rectified by Ronan Lyons with Brittle: How the Housing Crisis is Breaking Ireland—and How to Fix It, which is now available for pre-order. It will be released in October this year.

8. Alex Tabarrok has disproved the Coase conjecture.

9. I often think about how Jorge Luis Borges would have loved playing around with large language models. Many of their themes are presaged in his fiction. And if you’re a Borges fan, then you’ll know all about Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. I got a good chuckle out of reading Linch Zhang’s attempt to fine-tune an LLM to output, token-for-token, the original story.

10. The delightful Ben Yeoh writes a weekly letter. I found this most valuable for the update on the debate about whether cancer outcomes are actually improving, after you do the appropriate statistical adjustments for earlier testing and ageing. It looks like cancer mortality has fallen by about a third since the beginning of the 1990s.

11. A new magazine, In Development, has launched with an essay from Paul Niehaus about the origins of GiveDirectly. I enjoyed the cattiness of footnote 13, which matches my own scepticism about microfinance:

In Development’s editor-in-chief, Lauren Gilbert, also has her own linkpost, which points me toward Chris Blattman’s list of books that development economists should read.

12. In my essay about Milton Friedman, I mentioned how I found it strange that I couldn’t find anyone raising any eyebrows about a famous image of Friedman that was obviously doctored. From a Forbes journalist, a reader found some additional context, confirming that the image was fake and that Friedman got such a kick out of it that he sent it to all his friends.

13. My favourite linguistics book of all time is The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Here are some thoughts about it from Dwarkesh Patel.

 

Music and podcasts

1. Dario Amodei’s latest appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast. I’m tempted to say, tfw you just bet humanity’s future on a model of competing bottled-water companies from 1838:

2. Tom Holland speaks with Paul McCartney. Every time I hear McCartney speak, I can’t stop thinking about Simon Pegg explaining the embouchure of Beatles’ impressions.

3. From ChinaTalk, representatives from the Institute for Progress and the Foundation for American Innovation talk about how think tanks now work in America.

4. My latest Chinese history podcast discovery is Barbarians at the Gate. Here they are on the An Lushan Rebellion, the devastating civil war that ended the glory years of the Tang dynasty.

There are many posts on the internet about how, if you look at the list of the deadliest events in global history, it’s dominated by Chinese civil wars you’ve never heard of.

I have spent a long time being unable to put a finger on my confusion about historical Chinese population estimates. If you look either at estimates of city sizes, or war casualties, the numbers are weirdly outside the distribution an informed outsider would expect based on general technology development levels and other factors.

I remember reading The Better Angels of Our Nature as a teenager, and being astonished by the death estimates for various Chinese civil wars I’d never heard of. In chapter five, Steven Pinker writes that the An Lushan Rebellion “according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire’s population, a sixth of the world’s population at the time” (p.195).

That can’t possibly be right, can it?!

These figures come from taking the difference in total population between the Tang’s 754/755 AD census (~53M) and the 764 census (~17M).

The trouble is that nobody serious believes 36 million is a credible estimate for the death toll. ^{It’s more of an upper bound; the podcast hosts are of the view that this number mostly reflects dislocation and a collapse in the administrative state over the period. We have data from the Chinese census going back to 2 AD. Equating the difference in census numbers with deaths, in some sense, makes more functional places look worse, because they at least had enough state capacity to run a census. That hasn’t been true of most places at most times.}

I don’t think anyone has re-run the Pinkerian analysis of the history of violence with the appropriate scepticism that census numbers are upper bounds. Sadly, most attempted rebuttals to the Better Angels thesis were meandering and incoherent.

Also, did you know that one of the most famous poems in the world is about An Lushan? Any person who went to school in China can probably recite the opening couplet of Spring View, in which Du Fu reflects on the rebellion’s trail of destruction in the countryside:

The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain,
In the city in spring, grass and trees are thick.

All of this was a lot of preamble for what was, in the final analysis, only my second favourite podcast episode about the An Lushan Rebellion I listened to last month. My favourite was by Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time. In that episode, when Uncle Melvyn brings up Pinker’s name and his use of An Lushan in his book, it is unanimously greeted with guffaws by the expert guests. Guffaws!

5. On the life and philanthropy of John Arnold. I greatly enjoyed this: Arnold made his debut working at the (highly profitable, not fraudulent!) natural gas trading division of Enron. After Enron imploded, he went on to found one of the most profitable hedge funds in history. ^{At the age of 38, he returned the money from his fund to his investors to focus on philanthropy full-time.}

6. Paul Gillingham on life in Mexico. I know next-to-nothing about Mexico and still haven’t been, but I would gladly spend the rest of my days walking around with my AirPods while listening to podcasts like this to understand random locations and their histories.

7. 80,000 Hours on their rebrand to focus almost exclusively on advising careers related to the transition to AGI.

8. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 5. And the associated Sticky Notes episodes. Listened to live, conducted by Jonas Alber. This also formed the basis of my first classical music discussion group—an experiment in how far the reading group format can be extended. You can see my discussion prompts here. The third movement (Adagietto) is ridiculously good, but the way it connects with the others is pretty abstract, and in general, it’s tough not to get lost when listening to Mahler. So my conclusion is that this was too complex a piece to start with. I am now three down and seven to go when it comes to listening to all of the Mahler symphonies live before I die.

9. Benjamin Britten, Violin Concerto. One of my favourite finds in recent months; here’s a YouTube version by Janine Jansen. It was written in 1939 and is usually taken to be an elegy for the Spanish Civil War, although to me it sounds more like dread about an expected future war. Britten in general is not one of my favourites, but there are moments I love here, including the pizzicato in the first movement.

As I often do, I searched for what Tyler Cowen thinks about this. For what would have been his 100th birthday, he wrote about how Britten is important for understanding the economic thought of John Maynard Keynes and “the broader history of homosexuality in England” (what else?).

Books and Papers

1. DeepSeek, DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning. The original DeepSeek paper from January 2025. When it was released, it caused a haemorrhage in American tech stocks, because a Chinese language model was seen to have almost-frontier performance while being vastly more computationally efficient. It’s mind-boggling that this happened only a year and a half ago; it feels like a decade.

DeepSeek-R1 was the second ‘reasoning’ model after OpenAI’s o1. Before them, language models were certainly getting better, but there wasn’t a way to convert more tokens into a higher quality of answer. But with reasoning models, you use reinforcement learning to upweight tokens in the “chain of thought” that led to correct answers. This is what led LLMs to start saying things like “wait, let me reconsider…” and correcting themselves.

You can see my discussion prompts for my meetup the Fitzwilliam AI Circle about this and the DeepSeek paper here.

2. Amanda Askell, Claude’s Constitution. I suppose I’m late to the party, given that everybody was talking about this back in January. It’s pretty difficult to know what to make of this document, given that all of the details about how its contents are used in the training process are not publicly known. When Claude makes a moral judgement, how much of that is an emergent property of pretraining, how much is because of the system prompt, how much is reinforcement learning by human feedback, and how much is because of Anthropic-specific efforts on “model character”? Does anybody outside the labs even know? Does anybody inside the labs even know?

From what I understand, the constitution is trying to be a small set of hard constraints that are incorporated into the training process, such that the model has good judgement about which kinds of user requests to refuse or push back on, while “understanding” the reasons for that. This also reflects Anthropic’s vision (or psychosis, depending on how you want to look at it) of humanity growing alongside Claude. If we articulate enough high-quality examples of human reasoning, he might become wiser than us.

There was a truly absurd essay about the Constitution in the New Yorker from a woman who clearly made zero effort to actually understand any of the technical details of what it is, when the technical details here absolutely matter. See:

What is this person even talking about? Did the famous New Yorker fact-checkers not tell her that the document was only published in January this year? Or that the other labs release models that are (sans Grok) not obviously less ethical, without having a constitution?

Anyway, I saw somebody on Twitter ask why not reproducing copyrighted material isn’t in the Constitution; when I asked Fable, it said that this would be a bit like including a speed limit in a moral philosophy text. Copyright is historically contingent and jurisdiction-specific. Although I am no intellectual property anarchist, presumably you do not want to encode (say) the legal system of 2026 America into the timeless nature of moral judgement. In fact, that sounds a bit like a boot stomping on a human face, forever.

In the acknowledgements, I also found it amusing that there is one bishop and one priest thanked. Presumably the pope himself was unavailable.

Fun fact: I am one of the few owners of a physical copy of Claude’s Constitution. The soul of artificial intelligence is a pleasing #DE643C in hexadecimal colour code.

3. Alan Ahearne, Entrepreneurial Activity and Living Standards in Ireland. This is a paper written by the former economic advisor to Micheál Martin, which was commissioned by John and Patrick Collison. I was not involved, and I do not know Ahearne, but given that it has some obvious relevance to me, I thought I’d give it a read.

Crucial context is that, on average, Irish workers are some of the most productive in the world. But when you segment this out into multinational companies and domestic companies, we have an extremely productive multinational sector and an entirely unexceptional, perhaps mediocre, domestic economy. ^{This makes the Irish economy particularly vulnerable; a small handful of American companies leaving would be economically catastrophic. It also means that it would behove us to do more to encourage domestic entrepreneurship.}

4. George Berkeley, The Querist. I sometimes wonder whether I am the only person on earth who hasn’t read any of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, but has read his pamphlets on Irish coinage policy from the 1730s.

Berkeley’s famous philosophical work on idealism was all conducted in his 20s. What followed was a pretty fascinating life culminating in becoming the Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork in the Southwest of Ireland.

The Querist is a complete gem: a three-part pamphlet arguing for paper currency and a national bank, in the context of Ireland’s development, written entirely in the form of sarcastic numbered questions. It’s like if Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was about banking and credit but also occasionally agricultural productivity in 18th-century County Tipperary.

This book is sufficiently obscure that I struggled to find a copy, but the formatting on the Project Gutenberg edition was perfectly adequate. Eventually, I will finish my treatise on the Irish Enlightenment, but for now, you will have to make do with my saying that The Querist is one of the most underrated works in the history of economic thought.

 

Films and videos

1. Jonathan Demme, Stop Making Sense. If you’re not aware, this is a legendary recording of a Talking Heads concert performed in a theatre in Hollywood in 1983. They perform the hits from all of their albums up until that point, including Burning Down the House and their cover of Take Me to the River.