Our HN etiquette is preventing any full scale flames, but I feel my post wasn't very constructive anyway. I'll think twice before posting things like this next time.
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.
> 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. [...] ^And, yes, I'll say it... Government.
I like the sentiment of your comment and 100% agree about doing good deeds on an individual and business level. Unfortunately, the point about doing nice things doesn't always scale to a governmental level.
History backs this up quite clearly - when you capitulate even a little bit to demands due to unrest, you almost always get more unrest within 5 years. It's how the British Empire lost the 13 Colonies.
See, legitimate grievances do have to be addressed, but unfortunately addressing them in response to protest creates hugely empowered people fundamentally hostile to the government that capitulated. These people's power stems from their ability to extract concessions under rebellion or threat of rebellion, so, humans being what they are, they'll inevitably rebel or threaten to rebel after a short honeymoon period.
The solution is pretty clear in the history books - crack down brutally on the leadership, wait a suitably short amount of them, and then and only then redress grievances. That way, the people who are actually suffering have their needs fulfilled, but you don't have a class of organizers feeding and fueling further unrest and riots.
That particular policy has worked consistently throughout history. Crack down, then redress grievances and help the people. There's notable examples it working effectively across all eras and continents. Redressing and hoping that rioters are satisfied and don't continue without the crackdown doesn't work. Neither does cracking down without fixing problems.
This doesn't make the position ethical, moral, aesthetic, or what should be done. But it does seem to be the best way to fix problems without setting off a cascading cycle of violence and revolution.
The Americans executed a number of people who rebelled against the Continental Congress / Washington's Command, whereas the British were lenient. A very thorough treatment of this can be found in Chernow's "Washington - A Life" which is a very thorough biography/history.
You could also look at the Sengoku Era of Japanese history for many examples, you could compare Napoleonic France with the Neapolis Revolts in the same era. You could look at how Rome treated its protectorates and dependencies, as well as Britain (most of the time, America being a strange exception).
Abraham Lincoln's treatment of the Confederacy would be another example. Crush them, then bring them back into the fold.
Or compare the Pacific Theater of WWII vs. the Vietnam War from America's perspective... Japan was better-armed, better-trained, with superior forces than the Vietnamese, and the Americans were worse-equipped and more hastily trained at that point. The Japanese were easily equivalent guerrilla fighters to the Vietnamese. Yet America went total war and crushed the Empire of Japan (then rebuilt Japan intelligently - crushing without rebuilding creates a potential Nazi-Germany-after-Versailles situation)... whereas the American leadership tried some "moral leadership" insanity in Vietnam instead of total war.
Again, I'm not advocating any of these things. This is meant to be more descriptive than prescriptive, but maybe I'm being sloppy with language. But treating Hanoi in the 1960's the way they treated Tokyo in the 1940's would have seems like it would have likely secured a demilitarized and protected South Vietnam from the Northern Forces.
Maybe they couldn't have totally destroyed the communist forces and taken the North, but they absolutely could have fenced off the South and stopped the Khmer Rouge genocides from ever happening (they started the same year America withdrew - this isn't a coincidence). Millions of lives would have been better, more like South Korea than North Korea.
The examples in history of this abound. Leniency and concessions provoke more unrest. Crackdowns without redress eventually lead to the dam bursting. Doing both together tends to resolve the situation most often.
Like you, I see the government as a special case, which needs to follow different rules. Ideally, everyone would understand that our fortunes are all tied together and just be nice to each other. Unfortunately, short-sighted individuals will always (or have in the past, anyway) see that as an opportunity to sell out tomorrow for a dollar today, so someone needs to be forcing people to cooperate or the whole thing comes tumbling down.
The only question, which is still open as of this writing, is how you keep an organization which is by definition empowered to break its own rules on a short enough leash that it can't hang itself.