PIE SLICING IS A POOR METAPHOR FOR ECONOMIC ACTIVITY.

Years ago, before the staff went crazy, Charles Peters's Washington Monthly ran an article comparing the relative merits of pie-slicers, meaning people who worried how much a pie of a given radius each eater got, as opposed to pie-arrangers, who worried about how to produce larger pies.  I liked the metaphor so much I used it to mock a silly classroom plan long ago.

Pie-slicing, though, continues to be an obsession of the socialists.  Here's Robert Reich from 2004.  "If I’m right, and the current lopsided apportioning of the American economic pie between wages and profits is permanent, mark my words: It’s only a matter of time before the vast American middle class demands a fair portion of the pie. That may mean, at the least, higher taxes on profits and lower taxes on wages."

Twenty years later, two Common Dreams contributors sound the same theme.  "The share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the top 0.1 percent grew 59.6 percent from 1989 to 2024, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Federal Reserve data, while the share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the bottom 50 percent of households has declined 26.1 percent, adjusted for inflation."

There might have been changes in marginal tax rates in the intervening years, and the latest lunacy from the pie-slicers is about extending lower marginal tax rates for low-income wage earners because higher-income wage earners and coupon clippers also get lower marginal tax rates.  They also get the best government money can buy, which bothers Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo, who are with a propaganda shop called Inequality.

This bottom half of households in America — 66 million of them — had $4.1 trillion all together at the end of 2024. The 905 billionaires in the United States hold a combined $7.8 trillion in wealth, according to Forbes data from September 29, 2025. This alarming narrowing of wealth has given those at the very top political influence and power that undermines our democracy.

I suspect the "political influence and power" the Soros family or the Obamas is not what bothers them most, nor might they be receptive to the suggestion that the way to reduce the power and influence of rich people on "our democracy" might be to have a "democracy" that is less intrusive on our lives.  Indeed, the macroeconomic event that rearranged the "economic pie" is the responsibility of ... that intrusive government.

Real estate ownership accounts for roughly half of all the assets owned by the bottom 50 percent of households. This group was hammered by the real estate meltdown that began in 2007 and helped trigger The Great Recession of 2008. In 2005, the bottom 50 percent had a net worth of $2.44 trillion. By 2010, this had declined to $360 billion. It took the bottom 50 percent 9 years to recover its wealth to the level it achieved in 2005 at $2.44 trillion.

That "wealth recovery" suggests something was at work to arrange a bigger pie.  In 2014, James Pethokoukis argued that the "pie" metaphor was flawed.

Conservatives are for growth. Liberals are for redistribution. Conservatives worry about growing the pie. Liberals worry about slicing and re-slicing the pie to make sure everyone gets a fair piece.

At least those are the shorthand, flawed stereotypes. But it is the “pie” metaphor that I want to focus on for a second. A great blog post from awhile back by Keith Hennessey (as pointed out by Reihan Salam) argues that the economy isn’t a pie where some central planner with an apron predetermines the proper size of the dessert. Nor is the real economy some zero sum gain where if one pie slice grows, another must shrink.

Better, he suggests, to think of a garden.  Even so, there might be things policy types can do, analogous to tilling the soil and cultivating the weeds and applying the right kind of fertilizer and perhaps turning on the sprinkler; all of which North Carolina State's Mike Walden urges readers to contemplate.

Economic pie is a term often used to describe the size of the economy. Over time, economists and others track how the economic pie is growing. The slices of the pie then refer to how individuals share in the aggregate economy and its changing size. Is everyone’s slice increasing, or do some people get bigger slices while others are stuck with smaller slices. The formal term for the slices is “income distribution”.

These two concepts – economic growth and income distribution – are at the heart of many of our policy debates about topics such as taxes, regulations, government spending and financial support for households and businesses. Often in these discussions some groups will put more importance on economic growth, while others will consider income distribution to be the dominant concern.

I share David Friedman's reservations about referring to an "income distribution," as if there is somebody in the kitchen slicing the pie.  And in political economy, the buying and selling of government largesse surely depends on the willingness of politicians to be bought.  But, contra Messrs. Collins and Acompo, income inequality today might mean a relatively small share of an absolutely larger pie.  Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux offers "Four Ways You’re Living Better Than Ever."  People are living longer, occupying bigger houses, more likely to have their own car, and there's a greater variety of foodstuffs at the grocery.  He claims, "There is simply no truth to the countless claims that Americans have been economically impoverished over the past few decades by freer trade and globalization."

Yes, our choice sets might be larger, and yet there are likely to be skeptics who will suggest downsides to all that home ownership and motorcar use, and that cheap, plentiful food.  Better, though, I submit, to have expanding waistlines and expanding economic pies to fret about.