This sort of occasional oversized impact is not limited to economics. Take bsdiff for example: I wrote it because I was a poor university student and wanted to

This sort of occasional oversized impact is not limited to economics. Take bsdiff for example: I wrote it because I was a poor university student and wanted to make sure usage of FreeBSD Update didn't push me beyond my free bandwidth tier; making updates faster wasn't really a priority (the speedup from downloading binaries vs. recompiling dwarfed everything else) and I wasn't at all sure if anyone else would want to use bsdiff. It turns out that bsdiff has now saved thousands of lifetimes of people waiting for software updates to download. Even a small impact becomes huge if you scale it up to billions of users.