Sam’s Links: April 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 February and Links for March.

Blogs and short links

1. Why the disastrous Jones Act is uniquely bad for Puerto Rico.

2. Artificial intelligence can now rent humans.

3. Characteristic wisdom from Gavin Leech on how to learn statistics without going mad:

I agree with Gav that learning about generalised linear models, and playing around with glmnet in R, helped a lot. A lot of results about foundational concepts like linear regression at first appear like a list of arbitrary rules to be memorised, instead of a consequence of entirely understandable modelling choices.

4. China had fewer births in 2025 than in 1776.

5. For Progress Ireland, I wrote about the economic incidence of corporation tax:

6. Contra educators who believe that constant repetition turns students into mindless drones. And, the latest entry in “memorisation is underrated”: we should all be learning how to recite more poems by heart.

7. Looking back on St. Patrick’s Day and reflecting on how Irish cooks became so legendarily awful.

8. How Francis Bacon read books. I have a Bacon quote on my (horribly outdated, in need of improvement) bookshelf page on my personal website.

9. From Barra Roantree: In the absence of a proper land tax, it’s a no-brainer that Ireland should be making relatively greater use of property taxes. Instead, it’s been continually eroded and degraded.

10. Tom Cunningham on the economics of transformative AI.

11. Tom McCarthy on the lies we tell ourselves on useless days. I have had several of these recently.

12. [T]he Trump administration is suspending the Jones Act.

Music and podcasts

1. The Rest is History with Conan O’Brien on the Beatles.

2. Ebo Taylor, Ebo Taylor. Ebo Taylor would make it on to my list ‘favourite things Ghana’, which will exist if I ever get around to publishing my Ghanaian travelogue. Taylor coincidentally passed away last week – he was one of the giants of the highlife and Afrobeat genres. Heaven is my favourite track here.

3. What Henry Oliver learned by reading Peter Pan to his children. I often wonder about how much further I might have gotten in life if I had a voice and accent as marvellous as Henry’s.

4. Chick Corea, Hiromi, Duet. Hiromi is clearly an amazing pianist, although most of the studio albums are a bit, uhm, ‘anime’ for my taste. But, for me, this album strikes a perfect balance. I really enjoy Humpty Dumpty, which originally came from Corea’s album Mad Hatter.

5. Helen Castor on Richard II, Henry IV, and the political economy of medieval England. A very good discussion.

6. Adam Brown on general relativity, hitchhiking, and whether the nuclear bomb that fell on Nagasaki was dropped against direct orders. I find it hard to reconcile the way Brown discusses AdS/CFT correspondence as an occasionally useful toy model with Julian Gough’s hostility toward it.

7. A conversation between Dwarkesh Patel, Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken about whether reinforcement learning and LLMs are enough to get us to AGI. Has anybody written up a proper model in which, if fine motor skills are the last activity to be automated, the last jobs humans will have is assembling finicky parts on conveyor belts in windowless factories?!

8. Beatles, The White Album. This is the 1968 album with a white cover confusingly also called ‘The Beatles’. I have heard all of these songs individually many times, but it’s quite an interesting exercise to listen through in one sitting to hear how non-cohesive the album is. While My Guitar Gently Weeps is of course an all-time great. I had no idea about the strange role this album played in the Manson murders. I have a special fondness for Yer Blues and Helter Skelter. Revolution 9 is indeed unlistenable, although I at least finally understand the Simpsons parody.

Books and Papers

1. Trevor Chow, Basil Halperin, Zach Mazlish, Transformative AI, Existential Risk, and Real Interest Rates. I finally got around to reading this paper, which has been on my list for so long that it has gone through multiple iterations in the interim (I read the version from October 2025). Here are the LessWrong comments and EA Forum comments. There are also arguments against by Jakob Graabak.

The basic idea here is that, if you expect to consume much more in the future and/or be turned into a paperclip, then you should borrow and consume more now. Thus, the real interest rate should rise sharply. We are not seeing this. The market does not seem to be expecting transformative AI even within thirty years. So, to the degree that you believe the efficient market hypothesis, you should believe we aren’t getting AGI anytime soon.

Nicholas Decker says that this line of thinking doesn’t really make sense, because AI will primarily affect us through creating goods and services that are not meaningfully available today at any price. It’s possible that $1 will provide so much more utility in the post-AGI world that an efficient market would be producing a savings glut and falling real rates now. It’s also infamously difficult to reason backwards from real rates; here is Basil on why he thinks his paper doesn’t violate Cowen’s Third Law (“all propositions about real interest rates are wrong”).

At the same time, it feels like we should be able to say something useful about interest rates, because economics tends to understand risk and consumption smoothing pretty well. If I understood correctly, the effect that AI will have on either GDP or equity prices is much more unclear.

I have no strong opinions about any of this, but it seems like an important and fruitful line of research. My EA friends who think that this paper is just a lazy way for sceptics to entirely dismiss AI x-risk concerns are very, very wrong. As always, I am excited to see what these chaps come up with next.

2. Claude Shannon, Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. This is very fun; I am tickled by the long role of game-playing in the history of AI. My second crack at reading a Shannon paper after the mathematical theory of communication. You can see in this paper the origin of Shannon’s number, his estimate for the number of possible chess matches (which is still an unsolved problem!). This paper also made me realise I had mixed up my game theory history: although John Nash generalised it to any finite number of players and non-zero-sum games, we have known that games like chess have determinate outcomes since Von Neumann and Morgenstern.

3. Peter Singer, Ethics (Oxford Reader). It feels nice to read some philosophy again. I like the format of this book: It’s an anthology of sections from important works in ethics, interspersed with commentary. I believe this was my first time reading any non-Western philosopher (!). The major intellectuals that I feel vaguely guilty for never having read, that I can now at least say I’ve read a few pages of due to this book, include: Mencius, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Freud, Confucius, Martin Luther, Hegel, Henry Sidgwick, Wittgenstein, A.J. Eyer, The Buddha, Epicurus, Epictetus, Voltaire, Jeremy Bentham, William James, G.E. Moore, Gandhi, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and William Godwin. There is nothing like a linkpost to expose a man’s ignorance…

There are some strange errors in this book. In the context of his Commentary on the Sixth Commandment, Singer discusses Martin Luther’s “ninety-six” theses (p.402). I briefly thought I was going insane, before confirming that indeed, they haven’t added a new thesis since the last time I checked.

I also found something similar to be true of other Singer works, which are weirdly unconcerned with details. In Animal Liberation, with no scepticism whatsoever, he repeats an obvious hoax that there is a valley in Ecuador where people live up to 142 because of their vegetarianism (in reality, only one person in history is verified to have lived more than 120 years). This survived into the 2015 reissue with Yuval Noah Harari. In The Life You Can Save, page 114, he repeats likely communist propaganda that Cuba has lower child mortality than the United States.

Singer did a lot of work (of which this book is a great example) anthologising others’ work and making philosophy more empirical from the 1970s, so I think that the net amount of rigour probably increased. Still, it makes me struggle with papers like Moral Experts, which feels closer to moral psychology than moral philosophy. What to make of it, if its author is not actually interested in empirical detail and rigour?

4. Clemens Fuest, Andreas Peichl, Sebastian Siegloch, Do Higher Corporate Taxes Reduce Wages? Micro Evidence from Germany. A nice paper; see my Progress Ireland post for an explainer.

5. Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. This book seems to be an instance of the “string theory is like a taco” model of science communication. It contains sentences like the following (page 64):

Alan Turing published a famously critical step toward machine intelligence. He had proven that any solvable mathematical problem could, in principle, be solved by machine.

One assumes the authors must be referring to Turing’s computable numbers paper. It’s unclear what “solvable mathematical problem” is supposed to mean, which is not what Turing’s paper is about. The paper is generally seen as a strong piece of evidence in favour of the Church-Turing thesis, which says that anything effectively computable can be computed on a Turing machine. But Church-Turing is, by definition, an unprovable philosophical position, and not something that Turing claimed to be able to “prove”. The authors’ claim is especially strange, given that a later reformulation of the paper showed that the halting problem cannot be solved by a “machine”, even though it is (in some sense) a “solvable mathematical problem”.

It feels mean-spirited to continue to poke other holes in the book like this, because I appreciate the authors for trying to learn a new area and write the book they wish existed. But what resulted is really more about Claude Shannon’s vibes than anything else. This book is strongest talking about Shannon’s many interesting side projects, like the Roman numeral calculator (THROBAC) and robot mouse that learns how to navigate a maze (Theseus).

Films and video

1. Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme. From the same director as Uncut Gems, I thought this was quite good! However, I can’t help but think that this isn’t even the most interesting historical episode about an American table tennis player as it relates to diplomacy with East Asia to adapt. The story of how ping pong played a crucial role in the normalisation of American diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China would make for such a good film. Dave Franco could play the captain of the American team. Tony Leung as Zhou Enlai? An AI-generated simulation of Peter Sellers as Kissinger?!

2. Milton Friedman, Free to Choose. You can watch this entire ten-part series for free on YouTube. It’s genuinely well-done, and I wish I had watched it before my Friedman event. In episode four, the person on welfare in Britain interviewed about their long-term dependence on it has a thick Irish accent, which, uhm, probably didn’t do any favours for integration.

There are some very fun filming locations here. In episode eight, Friedman goes to the island of Kos to talk about Hippocrates, and how his famous oath is flagrantly violated by medical licensing. There are several “that was then, this is now” moments: in episode seven, Friedman says he only sometimes wears his seatbelt.

It’s funny how many people I recognise unexpectedly pop up in these episodes. Peter Temin is featured in episode three (his hair was already grey in 1980).

3. Óliver Laxe, Sirāt. Here is the review from Tyler Cowen, who calls it one of the five or six best films of the millennium. Here is a spoiler-filled post on what it really means. This is among the two or three films I’ve been most moved by in the last year. The big screen is essential.

4. Various, Six Nations: Ireland v Scotland. Even for someone who doesn’t really understand rugby, this was very good. It resulted in Ireland winning the Triple Crown, the trophy that goes to any Home Nation if they beat all of the others. Alas, Ireland lost the tournament to France.

You can read the full version of Sam’s February links here and March links here. 

Endnotes:

[1] They have two ways of measuring real interest rates: taking nominal rates and subtracting a measure of expected inflation, and also looking at the yields on long-term inflation-linked bonds. Encouragingly, these give the same answer.

[2] Why isn’t the number of possible chess games infinite? That is because of the fifty move rule, which says that the game ends in a draw if no piece is captured and no pawn is moved for fifty moves.

[3] Location 3428 of 5674 in the Kindle edition (chapter 4). Confusingly, this book is different from the 2023 reissue, Animal Liberation Now, which is also with Yuval Noah Harari. That version contains significant updates to the content, but I haven’t read it.

[4] The 2024 Ig Nobel Prize went to research about the clerical errors and fraud that explain ‘blue zones’, alleged hotspots with remarkable life expectancies. Here is Cremieux on claims of extreme longevity.

[5] Turing himself did not believe that the human brain is limited by that which is Turing computable.

[6] I know I already suggested him for the hypothetical Morris Chang biopic, but he’s really good.