Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, is on the morning media round. She is treating the world to a dose of pie theory. She has actually referred to the need "for a bigger pie."
Pie theory, as I call what she is saying, suggests that all we need to do to solve our economic problems is “grow the pie”. That's the standard line. The claim is that if we just focus on economic growth, everything else will fall into place. A bigger economy, we are told, means we can afford better public services, pay people more, and share things more fairly.
This is the fundamental justification for Labour's current economic policy. Growth first. Redistribution later. If we're lucky.
But it's a deeply misleading metaphor, and one that hides more than it reveals.
First, the whole idea assumes that the pie is, in fact, shared. That is not true. Over the last forty years, we've had economic growth. The pie has grown. But the benefits have gone almost entirely to those at the top. The richest 1% have taken most of the additional slices, while the majority have seen their share stay the same or even shrink in real terms.
The metaphor does, then, hide inequality, because it implies that growth benefits everyone equally. It doesn't. It benefits those with the most power, and power, of course, shapes both who receive and who go without.
Second, the pie metaphor ignores the question of who controls the oven. That is, it overlooks the fact that growth is not an abstract force of nature. It results from policy choices, corporate strategies, labour relations, and financial interests. Who decides what is produced, who does the work, and who profits from it?
When GDP goes up because rents rise, who gains? When the stock market grows thanks to layoffs and automation, is that a bigger pie — or a more extractive one?
The “grow the pie” idea suggests neutrality, but economic outcomes are anything but neutral. They are outcomes of inbuilt structural advantages. They reinforce the status quo. If growth flows to the rich, that is not accidental. It is designed.
Third, the metaphor ignores the limits of the bakery. We live on a finite planet. Environmental boundaries are being breached. Climate breakdown is accelerating. The pursuit of growth, as measured by GDP, often comes at the expense of ecological stability, community cohesion and even human happiness.
Sometimes what we need is not a bigger pie, but a different recipe.
And fourth, the metaphor never asks the most important questions, which is growth of what, for whom, and why?
Is it growth in arms sales?
In fossil fuel production?
In financial speculation?
Or is it growth in care work, education, green infrastructure, and social well-being?
GDP doesn't distinguish between those things. But we should.
Which brings me to the core of the issue. The size of the pie is not the issue. We already produce more than enough to ensure that everyone in the UK could live a decent, secure life. The problem is how the pie is cut. And that is a political question, not an economic one.
So long as politicians refuse to engage with the question of distribution, whether it be of wages, of wealth, of land, of capital, and of political power, the size of the economy is largely irrelevant. A bigger pie can still leave millions hungry.
The truth is simple. Redistribution is now the priority. If we want a fair economy, we have to start by deciding who gets what and why. That means more progressive taxation. That means universal public services. That means tackling rent extraction. That means confronting wealth, inclduing that derived from the control of financial services, and the power it buys.
The pie has grown enough. It's time to talk about how we share it, and Labour will not do that.
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Nandy is a thorough disappointment. She seemed to storm on the scene and then got enveloped by Starmer’s ‘you have to take the world as you find it’ attitude. I heard her toted as the party’s saviour at the weekend and could not believe my ears.
Sounds like she’s talking ‘nandy-pamby’ to me.
“confronting wealth, inclduing that derived from the control of financial services, and the power it buys.”
This is true. Also true is that the leaders of LINO probably know the game is up & will want to secure comfy sinceures. This means no confrontations with wealth or those that control and pretend to deliver public services via private companies (water, transport, elec, gas etc). All govs since +/- 1990 have been selected mostly by those that control wealth. Some parties are formed by wealth e.g. Fart-rage & Deform (Americans would call them astro-turf parties). Parties that appear to challenge the current narrative/trajectory & thus may change things if elected, are destroyed (ref, Labour – 2016 to 2020).
Thanks
As long as I can remember, my granny bought a lemon-meringue pie (lmp) when we came back to Ireland every summer holiday. I love lmp. Still do.
I am content with a slice of lmp and am happy to share.
However, I feel sick to stomach when huge slices of lmp are grabbed by others, or when the pie is taken out of circulation and hoarded by those already bulging at the waist through excessive pie consumption.
Wasn’t there a king of England who died from eating too many lampreys?
🙂
My mother made an amazing lmp..
Yes, Henry 1st
Apparently, according to NIESR, the oldest think tank in the country (1938) the pie has a £40bn “black hole” in it (someone burnt it?) and far from growing it, we need to take a whopping great chunk OUT of it by raising basic and higher tax rates by 5%.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/aug/06/tax-rises-budget-deficit-rachel-reeves-niesr
Maybe Lisa Nandy and Rachel Reeves could give us all a Greg Wallace-free special episode of Masterchef, to help us understand how the NIESR macro-economic pie-making model works.
I look forward to reading food critic RJM sharing from the MMT collection of pie recipies in the near future.
I will be dealing with the NIESR thing…
My 25 year old niece has just been made redundant. The small hotel chain she worked for in marketing was taken over by a larger chain owned by a billionaire. They wanted her to do twice as much work for the same amount of money.
Somebody is getting too much pie there, and it isn’t my niece.
Correct
I hope she finds other work
Yes, that kinds of sums everything up doesn’t it, same wages but more work or less wages and the same work. Same with food prices and everything else, we pay more and get less.
The growing pie is just an elaborated version of growth. The size of the pie isn’t the problem, it’s the way it’s shared out. Like most people I do not fully understand the intricacies of macro and microeconomics and many other such things, but when people can’t get a dentist, wait 18 months or more for a hospital appointment, potholes cover roads, water rates are sky high yet they are dumping billions of litres of untreated sewage in rivers and paying CEOs many millions a year, raising the pension age, giving tax breaks to billionaires and corporations and people who do not need anymore, the cost of ‘public’ transport is too expensive and then they’re sucking money out of the economy with austerity measures further exacerbating and entrenching poverty and social divisions I know as millions of others do that something is seriously wrong. Not just materially but also morally.
A film: “Matria” from Spain 2023. About very ordinary people. It is in Galician – but with English subtitles. It is well worth 90 mins of your time.
“They wanted her to do twice as much work for the same amount of money.” …. universal = in every country & covered in the film.
(you can get it on Pirate Bay).
We need more custard pies for politicians who talk complete bollocks knowing it to be complete bollocks. Are you sitting comfortably children ….
I don’t know which is more terrifying: that they know it’s complete bollocks but say it anyway because they think it will fool us, or that they are so ignorant that they believe the bollocks themselves.
We truly are being led by donkeys.
Given my interactions with local politicos, including my past and present MPs, I’d say contempt is a large factor. Previous (Tory) MP described me as an extreme lefty know-all; the current one avoids me with a cheery wave and dodge routine, having sat on the same executive, he knows I know.
Quite so, Kim, we truly are being led by donkeys.
I’ve taken an arm’s-length interest in the performance of Chancellors of the Exchequer (because of my accounting background) for the last 60 years. Can anyone recall a Chancellor who really understood how the economy works (creation of money, the role of taxation, role of the BoE and commercial banks etc), who made fiscal choices that truly applied these principles and who could explain his/her decisions in simple and honest terms that could be understood by the populace? I can’t recall a single one of them who could tick all three of these boxes and would be intrigued to learn if anyone can.
Your recall is correct, Ken.
Very much agree with this, and on the third point I’d add to the metaphor that the bakery requires heat (energy) and more ingredients (materials). I understand there is a very strong correlation between energy and (world) GDP, and a complete correlation between materials and GDP. To call for a bigger pie is therefore to call for more use of energy, and given energy properties this likely means more (finite) fossil hydrocarbons with some renewables on top, and increased extraction of finite resources with the associated environmental or societal degradation and destruction. So the call is to further destroy the natural world which we are part of, and which we need for our own survival, to boost GDP to benefit a small subset of human society. Quite a poor tradeoff!
On the alternatives, a book I read with interest was the Club of Rome’s Earth 4 All, which is based on the limits to growth work, and presents a couple of scenarios and the policies required to reach the better outcome: https://earth4all.life/.
Let’s give a name to the pie that Lisa Nandy is mindlessly talking about. It’s a “Rich First Pie” not a “Together First Pie” or if you prefer a “Rich Few Pie” not a “Many First Pie.” Put that pie into an increasingly inter-connected global economy and it’s still a “Rich Few Pie” because elites in countries supposedly democratically diverse as China and Germany suppress demand in their countries to keep their export prices low.
“New trade rules are needed to create an international trading system that preserves the freedom of countries to set their own economic policy, protect them from bearing the costs of other nations’ industrial policies, and allows for the allocation of resources and production through a system of comparative advantage.”
Amended quote from the following article:-
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/trade-intervention-for-freer-trade?lang=en
I had the tastiest pork pie ever at in Westerdale cricket ground N Yorkshire last week.
As Richard points out , the content and mix of the pie is key – not its size.
This one had lots of health and education, and decent minimum household incomes and affordable housing, Not a hint of nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, speculation and rent – seeking.
Marvellous.
The NIESR report of a £41 bn shortfall in government accounts five years hence almost exactly matches the shortfall in tax revenue caused by Brexit. Nobody mentions it. If Labour really wanted to grow the pie they would rejoin the single market and customs union pdq. The fact that they refuse to tells us that growing the pie is a fairy story.
We come back to sharing the (shrunken) pie equitably and external events. Climate change? Labour don’t want to know. How will they cope with a financial crisis, which is coming with or without the high drama of a stock market crash? If they apply standard policies, oodles more private sector credit = more private sector debt.
I’m currently reading “In Covid’s Wake” by Lee and Macedo, two American scientists who show how bad policies were forced through with demands for complete conformity. This is the real problem: mass delusions and tight autocratic control prevent proper consideration of policy alternatives.
Thank you.
‘In Covid’s Wake doesn’t sound very good at all.
This review
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/laptopclassbook/
suggests they give credence to the notorious Great Barrington Declaration – which advocated spreading the virus as widely as possible other than in the ‘most vulnerable’ groups’ to create ‘natural herd immunity’.
This went against all established public health / vaccine strategies – and had a lot of influence on Johnson’s cabinet – and probably resulted in far more covid deaths than necessary.
Its still not part of the national understanding that covid is airborne, that it is still present, that thousands are suffering long term consequences, and the need for clean indoor air in schools and workplaces , and ventilation and/or masks in crowded spaces.
The Great Barrington declaration comes across differently when you read In Covid’s Wake. You are responding to the strong campaign against it
Nothing ever excused the Great Barrington Declaration. It was and is eugenic.
Speaking as a retired vet and former member of the standing FMD Vaccination taskforce, with a good understanding of virology and immunology, I was horrified beyond belief when Alexander B de Pfeffel Johnson jumped ignorantly but culpably, on the herd immunity tumbril. As a consequence of his incompetent delays he has a LOT of blood on his hands.
I personally equate the GBD with Hitler’s “Final Solution” morally speaking.
Vets deal routinely with “herds” whereas medics, outside of public health departments, deal with individuals.
There has NEVER been a single example of an infectious viral epizootic (veterinary) or epidemic (human) outbreak of contagious disease being controlled by “herd immunity” in the absence of an effective vaccination programme. The proposal was ridiculous. The “Sweden” story is grossly and maliciously misrepresented to further conspiracy theorists.
In addition, when dealing with humans, rather than farm animals, you have to consider the vulnerability of the temporarily or permanently immuno-incompetent, as you can’t compel 100% vaccination in a human population, it isn’t safe for a minority, but mass vaccination (over 90%) is essential for the society’s joint welfare. (There IS such a thing as society)
If you combine anti-lockdown with anti-vax, you would see something of a viral Armageddon, or the depopulations wrought by the plague in earlier centuries.
The USA (and poor countries it used to support) is going to experience something like this with RFK’s murderous anti-vax policies, unless philanthropy or regime change intervenes.
Much to agree with
Pies do not grow. They are cooked – like books. Then they are shared – or not. The real question for people, apart.from who is allowed to sit at the table, is how the pies are shared. That a so-called ‘Labour’ politician does not see this as the first question to be asked, and have its answers altered, tells us all we need to know about their government’s authenticity. Zero.
Well they’re a “Rich First” political party aren’t they not a “Many First” party? That was blindingly obvious to anybody who looked carefully at Starmer’s antics before he got elected to run the country!
This actually presents anyone listening with a simple point of attack to Labour. If I can use your post:
“The metaphor does, then, hide inequality, because it implies that growth benefits everyone equally. It doesn’t. It benefits those with the most power, and power, of course, shapes both who receive and who go without.”
So if we increase the pie, those with most get a lot more and those with little get next to nothing more. If we simply redistribute the pie, those with most, can still get the most, but those with little can get substantially more – and we don’t require further resources.
Think of the world as a pie, and it’s finite. It cannot grow. We use, consume and degrade what is available now. For food, we grow what is needed, but that requires arable land and pasture; but there a limits here too.
Countries only think of their pie, but rarely of this very real and fundamental limit. Time will come, hastened by climate change (and war, if we are stupid enough), when each country’s pie has no way of growing.
We need to anticipate and adapt our economies to live our lives within these limits; we can do it in an orderly way, or the world will force humans to adapt, probably in a far harsher way.
Nature really is red in tooth and claw, and it could so easily be humans lying at its feet.
I was surprised yesterday to see, splashed over the news media, the “report” by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, propagating the usual “tax-rises-spending-cuts-necessary” neoliberal bollocks. Because I heard a year or two ago, at a forum discussion in Bristol with Jagjit S Chadha of the NIESR and Huw Pill of the BoE, Chadha loudly speaking of “ridiculous and arbitrary fiscal rules”. Turns out Chadha returned in 2024 to the University of Cambridge, and has been replaced this year as NIESR Director by one Professor David Aikman.
https://niesr.ac.uk/news/professor-david-aikman-appointed-new-director
Aikman worked for 17 years as an economist at the BoE, and Kings College for the Quatar Centre for Global Banking and Finance.
So the NIESR has been thoroughly captured by the neoliberal establishment, and has become another mouthpiece for it.
I’m sad to say that our politicians are bought and paid for puppets. Starmer is a stooge and the rest of what’s left of the LP are various shades of yellow, fake, brown nosers and sell outs with possibly a few exceptions.
Kind of interesting I always thought those people who had or have the courage to simply challenge the narrative. I always have but maybe I’m stupid or naive or a but autistic, truly I don’t know and of course I’m a nobody from nobodies, I have nothing much and I don’t have much to lose.
But in spite of all that, all the piss and wind I see from 99.8% of those with power, who make the decisions and who own wealth, just looks like excuses to feed the wealth of those who are already bloating like maggots on the carcase of our society. All of them, the Royal family, big landowners, the ‘City’, the political class by and large, big business and the speculative financial markets. Yes I know I’ve said it on here before, but it’s true isn’t it. Not one of them can have an ounce nay a milligram of compassion for those crushed by the system and the spineless supine whines and whimpering from the political and media class and the faceless evil of the money behind it all.
What can we do? I don’t know but pointing out the evil and amorality of those behind it all certainly helps.
Is it possible to have a long term productive capitalism that grows and doesn’t have an accumulative nature?
The marxist theory of the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” suggests that it is difficult, meaning it is technically impossible to avoid, but capital will try to recuperate profits with other means, what we call hoarding nowdays probably.
No
The ‘pie’ is already £12-14 TRILLION big (latest estimate of UK stock of private wealth). I would have thought that quite a few slices could be taken out of that to achieve a more caring, equitable society without scrabbling around for this increasingly elusive ‘growth’.
This is where a socialist approach, treating people as a family not a business opportunity, is needed. I think Jeremy and Zarah and Mick Lynch and the thousands who have expressed an interest in joining the new party are the hope for a sharing, caring society.
A true commonwealth that is about the people being sovereign rather than money or unaccountable power or a royal we never elected. That for a start might help. Giving something back to the majority instead of building society from the top down.
I know one thing, it cannot go on as it has been for the last 40 years. Those in power are completely aware that most people are not happy at the political, social and particularly economic chaos, chicanery, corruption and the chronic divisions and dearth of social and representative democracy that we now have as normal. Society is now morally bankrupt. Other kinds of bankruptcy always follow that.
The promises in the Labour manifesto were all predicated on “growth”. It was quite clear to anyone – even an economic illiterate like me – that Labour would be unable to keep those promises, because “growth” had been relatively static in the OECD for years. Why on earth would anyone base a manifesto on such a wispy, elusive concept??
The World Bank stats make interesting reading. OECD countries all took a hit after the 2008 crash, but the UK took the worst. In terms of growing the unequal “pie”, the UK was worst hit initially by COVID, at -10.3, (OEDC -3.9) but guess what? Growth in the UK shot up to +8.6 in 2021 during COVID, outstripping the OECD at +6. Then we fell down again.
That begs the question: who benefitted from that very sharp rise? From -10.3 to +8.6?? In one year? The GDP per capita figures are even more extreme.
I know I didn’t benefit. Did you? But the billionaires in the UK tripled their wealth. During a pandemic.
[…] more I think about Pie Theory, the more questions […]
Here in South Yorkshire we are blighted by having a metro mayor forced on us whose fiefdom turns out to be another expensive layer of bureaucracy and an autocracy to boot. The poverty of ambition – or the cynical behaviour of people whose self interest is the one growth area in this region – is openly stated. Bus franchising won’t start until Autumn 2027. It’s actually yet another transfer of money from the public sector to the private as we are seeing in Greater Manchester. There, just setting up the franchise has cost £134.5m, with the private companies – rather than being fully publicly owned and run – continuing receiving the equivalent of the dividends they previously enjoyed. Clive Betts’ 2019 bus review concluded that fully publicly owned bus services would save £500m a year which does highlight just how lucrative the operations are for the private sector. The intention of Starmer and Reeves to roll out franchising as a solution to our appalling transport – the worst and most expensive in Europe – will inevitably fail as spectacularly as Thames water has.
And this is just one aspect where full public ownership, rapid improvements to our lives, communities, the environment and local economies is being sacrificed to the failed Thatcherite ideology of public/private partnerships. Cash cow Britain continues.
From SYMCA “ Our Strategic Economic Plan (SEP) provides the blueprint for how we will transform our region. We will keep people and businesses moving and help them grow, delivering a public transport network and attracting investment to create a stronger, greener, fairer South Yorkshire by 2040.”
I had not realised Burnham’s model was a sham