I for one would like to thank you for posting it-- I've been thinking about these things a lot lately, and it's good to see I'm not the only one.

From my perspective, the underlying point -- which it seems the IMF is starting to realize -- is that there exists a fundamental tendency for things to even out over time, and this tendency is as valid in economics and social policy as it is in thermodynamics, and for the same reason: any extreme action necessitates an extreme reaction. One can't exist without the other. Wealth sitting in a bank account accomplishes no more than gas sitting in a tank; to get work done requires movement of energy from high-energy (wealthy) states to low-energy (poor) states. Equalizing inequalities.

What that means is that actions you take that affect other people in turn affect you; helping someone else will come back to help you, and screwing someone else will come back to bite you in the ass. Maybe a hundred years ago, a tycoon could rip somebody off and be reasonably confident he would be dead before the social consequences of that action caught up with him. We don't live in that world anymore; thanks to the Internet, if I screw somebody today, or do something nice for somebody, I might find myself getting screwed or helped -- in a completely unrelated but causally connected way -- next year.

I think this is something that hackers get intuitively. For example: Say I invent a new programming language.

If I'm Sun in the 90s, I'm thinking about my profits. Developing a language costs time, and time is money. I want to lock down the IP tight, not to control it, just to make sure people pay me my fair share for the development. This works, for a while, and I earn back my investment; but the programming community explodes, my proprietary system can't keep up, and I get left behind. I eventually relicense the technology as FOSS, but it's too little, too late. I get bought.

If I'm an unemployed hacker in 2009, I don't have any illusions about making money from the project. I release everything for free. Three months later, a hundred people are contributing to the project. Six months later, it's a thousand. In two years, the first commercial projects using my language launch, and I'm using them. I've directly benefitted my own life-- all without seeing a cent from it.

Five years later, I'm employed as a consultant advising on my own platform. I still contribute to a dozen other FOSS projects and help people online; what I'm selling I'll gladly give away for free. According to the fundamentals of economics, my time should be worthless. But people who can afford to pay me for it, not out of altruism, but because they understand it's an investment in our community that will definitely pay back tenfold, whether or not that value winds up in their ledger books or someone else's.

This isn't speculation; we're watching it happen. Companies in the tech industry who are always willing to spend a little more on an interesting idea that probably won't pay off-- well, it usually doesn't. Sometimes they go out of business. But the ones that do pay off pay off big, creating whole industries, and carrying the rest of us along for the ride. The people who went out of business have no trouble finding investment capital for their next crazy idea.

Meanwhile, the industrial powers who only got big by eating each other, the old giants of manufacturing and finance^, companies who have been so obsessed with cutting costs to boost quarterly profits have been quietly (and not-so-quietly) running themselves into the ground, taking their entire industry and economy down with them.

^And, yes, I'll say it... Government.