"Well, we’re movin’ on up

To the East Side

To a deluxe apartment in the sky

We’re movin’ on up

To the East Side

We finally got a piece of the pie!"

- Theme song from "The Jeffersons"

Wonderful! A piece of the pie! Who wouldn’t want a piece of the pie?

The question that preoccupies many in government is how big everyone’s slice is. Some work to position the government in the role of pie slicer, making sure that nobody’s piece is any bigger than anyone else’s. The rest of the world often looks at the World Pie and complains that America has too big a piece.

Not enough people are paying any attention to the size of the pie.

After all, none of this matters if the pie itself is shrinking. The American Pie, the World Pie, all of it – when, in times of economic distress, there’s less pie to slice up, and the more we squabble over the size of the pieces we have left, the smaller the pie gets.

In fact, a pie is a terrible metaphor for the world’s wealth. It implies that the size of the economy is a static thing, finished and unchangeable, and that, like a pie, its overall status is unaffected by how it’s sliced.

That’s nonsense.

Slicing the pie ought to be a secondary consideration. We need to spend more time making the pie as big as possible.