G12: Fixed Pie or Growing Pie

The last A

Imagine a course of twenty students in which each gives one graded presentation. Nineteen have presented. Their grades run high: five A's, five B's, four C's, three D's, two F's. The twentieth student is about to begin. What grade will they most likely get?

Did you hesitate to say A? Many people do. So many A's have already been handed out; surely there can't be many left. When the psychologist Daniel Meegan put this question to 556 students at the University of Guelph in 2010, half of them saw the grades above and half saw an ordinary, symmetrical spread. The students who saw the many A's predicted lower grades for the next presenter: more D's and F's, fewer A's and B's. Most still guessed a B or a C, but the whole distribution of their guesses shifted downward.

There was no reason for it to. As of 2010 the University of Guelph did not grade on a curve. Its policy, as Meegan quoted it, told instructors "not to use predetermined, arbitrary distributions in the assignment of grades"; every student was measured against a fixed standard, and in principle all twenty could earn an A. Most of Meegan's participants had little experience of any other system, since relative grading was "also forbidden at the primary and secondary levels." They leaned toward scarcity anyway.

Now try two more questions, and answer quickly. When the rich get richer, does it come at the expense of everyone else? When immigrants find work, does it come at the expense of people already here? If you answered yes to one and no to the other, you are in good company, and you have just met this grammar in yourself. Many people who answer one of those questions with a confident yes answer the other with a confident no, and which one tends to depend on their politics.

What the grammar is

Every situation in which people stand to gain or lose has what game theorists call a sum: the total of everyone's gains and losses added together. In 1944 the mathematician John von Neumann and the economist Oskar Morgenstern, in Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, established a rigorous mathematical framework for interactions of this kind, and drew the distinction that gives this grammar its subject:

An important viewpoint in classifying games is this: Is the sum of all payments received by all players (at the end of the game) always zero; or is this not the case? If it is zero, then one can say that the players pay only to each other, and that no production or destruction of goods is involved. All games which are actually played for entertainment are of this type. But the economically significant schemes are most essentially not such.

In a zero-sum situation, one party's gain is exactly another's loss. Poker is zero-sum; so is a chess match, an election for a single seat, or the last place on a team. Von Neumann and Morgenstern called everything else non-zero-sum; later writers split that into two. In a positive-sum situation, the total grows, and everyone can come out ahead: a trade both parties want, a discovery anyone can use, a road that shortens everyone's journey. In a negative-sum situation the total shrinks, as in a feud or a trade war, and everyone can come out behind.

Von Neumann and Morgenstern's point about the economy came in the same breath as the definition: "the sum of all payments, the total social product, will in general not be zero, and not even constant. I.e., it will depend on the behavior of the players — the participants in the social economy." Most of life is not a parlor game. The size of the pie depends on what people do.

Most real situations are not purely any one of these. They are mixed. Part of what is at stake can grow; part of it is fixed; and who gets which part is a separate question from how big the whole is. A new factory may enlarge a town's total income while ending one family's livelihood. A trade agreement may lower prices for millions while closing a few hundred plants. A scholarship may be unlimited in principle and scarce in practice.

The grammar is the habit of arguing about a mixed case as though it were purely one or the other. This site calls a recurring pattern of argument like this a grammar: a shape the same mistake takes across many different subjects, so that once you can see it in one argument you can see it in others. This one has two poles, and each is a real failure.

Pole A, the fixed-pie thinkers, treat every gain as someone's loss. If a company profits, its customers must be paying too much; if another country grows, ours must be shrinking; if newcomers find work, someone else must have lost it. They see the slices and miss the oven.

Pole B, the pie-growers, treat every situation as one where everyone can win, and wave away the people who in fact lose. They are right that the pie often grows. They are wrong when they talk as if it grew evenly, as if growth in the total settled the question of shares, or as if those who end up with a smaller slice were imagining it. They see the oven and miss the slices.

There is a third failure, rarer but costly: two parties so intent on their shares that they shrink the whole, turning a positive-sum situation into a negative-sum one. A trade war is the classic case, and it appears in the history below.

The anatomy of a mixed case

Undoing the grammar means taking a situation apart. Four questions do most of the work.

What can grow? Knowledge, most goods and services, and the gains from exchange can usually be made larger. When two people trade because each values what the other has more than what they give up, both are better off and no one has been robbed.

What is fixed in supply? Some things cannot be made more of, at least not here and not soon: this field, this stretch of river, this house. If one party takes it, another cannot have it. The philosopher John Locke saw this in his Second Treatise of Government (1689, dated 1690 on its title page). A person who works land makes it their own, he argued, "at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others." While that condition holds, taking costs no one anything: "No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst." The justification is explicitly conditional. It describes a whole river. It does not say what happens when the river is no longer whole.

What is positional? Some things are valuable only because others have less of them: rank, a reputation, first place, a seat at a selective college. The economist Fred Hirsch called these positional goods. Growth cannot multiply them, because their value is relative by definition. If everyone's income doubles, the top tenth of earners is still a tenth.

Who gets which share? Even when the whole grows, a share can shrink, and sometimes one share grows while the whole shrinks. This is the question the pie-growers most often skip, and the one their own discipline has had to keep relearning, as the history below shows.

A situation's sum is a fact about the situation, not about the people arguing over it. But which parts of a situation people choose to count, and which they leave out, is very much a fact about the people. That choice is where the grammar does its work.

Why it is so persistent

The fixed-pie intuition is old and was often correct. For most of human history, land, game, water and rank really were limited. A common hypothesis is that this made zero-sum assumptions an adaptive evolutionary shortcut, inclining people toward competition over cooperation when resources seemed threatened. It is a plausible story, but so far a story: the evidence for it, as the research below shows, is thin.

In 2010 Daniel Meegan gave the pattern a name, zero-sum bias: "intuitively judging a situation to be zero-sum … when it is actually non-zero-sum." His experiments concerned grades, but he argued that the same shortcut could explain how people misread trade, immigration and other situations in which value can be created rather than merely moved. On where it comes from, he was cautious. The bias may have "evolved as a cognitive adaptation to enable successful intra-group competition for limited resources," he wrote, but his experiments "provide insufficient evidence" to show that. He offered a plainer explanation as well: students raised in a culture "in which peers are considered competitors for a limited number of desirable career opportunities" may simply have learned to treat every career-oriented activity as a contest.

Two of his findings matter for catching the habit. First, it ran only one way. Many high grades made students expect lower ones; many low grades did not make them expect higher ones. "People are more aware of the consequences of the gains of others than the losses of others," he wrote, adding, in a speculative aside about why the middle class watches the rich more closely than the poor: "One might say that envy is more powerful than guilt." Second, the bias could be reduced. Reminding students of the grading policy weakened it.

A large survey by the economists Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira and Stefanie Stantcheva, published in 2026 in the American Economic Review, asked 20,400 US residents to agree or disagree with statements such as "If one income group becomes wealthier, this comes at the expense of other groups" and "In trade, if one country makes more money, then another country makes less money." Three of its findings bear on this grammar.

The first is that zero-sum thinking does not belong to one political side. People who saw the world in more zero-sum terms were more likely to support redistribution from rich to poor and affirmative action, and also more likely to support tighter limits on immigration. It tended to go with alignment with the Democratic Party, but the authors conclude that it "is not mainly a partisan issue but can help explain otherwise puzzling within-party variation in policy views."

The second is where it comes from. The authors trace it to experience, often of situations that really were zero-sum. People whose families had climbed the income ladder over generations, or who descended from recent immigrants, were less zero-sum. People whose ancestors had been enslaved, or who grew up in counties with more slavery in 1860, were more so. Their phrase for a mindset formed in one world and carried into another is "cultural mismatch": it "may continue to prevail even in situations that no longer are zero-sum."

The third is a question about scope. The authors ask whether "populism, conspiracy theories, and nativism are all rooted in the belief that one group gains at the expense of others." If so, this grammar has a close neighbor in G6: The Hidden Hand. A belief that every gain is somebody's theft goes looking for the thief.

The psychologists Shai Davidai and Martino Ongis add the finding that matters most for this site, the one tested by the second pair of questions at the top of this page. In six studies published in 2019, they found "that both liberals and conservatives view life as zero-sum when it benefits them to do so." The direction depends on what a person wants to defend or change: "Whereas conservatives exhibit zero-sum thinking when the status quo is challenged, liberals do so when the status quo is being upheld." Conservatives in their studies tended to see gains for women, minorities and immigrants as coming at others' expense, while seeing the economy as a growing pie; liberals tended to see economic inequality as a transfer from the many to the few, while seeing social change as a growing pie. Their paper opens with two quotations side by side. Bernie Sanders: "The billionaires of America are on the warpath." Donald Trump: "[Mexican immigrants] are taking our jobs." Both are fixed-pie claims, from opposite ends of American politics, about opposite subjects.

That is the deepest reason the grammar persists. It is not only an old instinct misfiring in a modern economy. It is a tool people pick up and put down according to which way they want the argument to go.

How the argument has been had before

The claim that one person's gain is another's loss is very old, and so is the argument against it. What the history shows, again and again, is that each side was right about something and wrong about the rest.

The funeral seller. Michel de Montaigne, in a chapter of his Essays (1580) titled "That the profit of one man is the damage of another," retold a story his editor traces to the Roman philosopher Seneca. The Athenian Demades condemned a man who sold funeral supplies because, in Montaigne's telling, his profit "could not accrue to him, but by the death of a great number of people." Montaigne thought the verdict "ill grounded," but not because he doubted its premise. He made the premise universal: "no profit whatever can possibly be made but at the expense of another," so condemning the funeral seller would mean condemning every trade. "The merchant only thrives by the debauchery of youth, the husband man by the dearness of grain, the architect by the ruin of buildings, lawyers and officers of justice by the suits and contentions of men." This is the fixed-pie view in its purest form, from one of the most humane minds of his age. Then he turned it on his reader: "let every one but dive into his own bosom, and he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow up at another's expense."

The enclosure of land. Locke, who attached the condition of "enough, and as good," also made one of the most influential growing-pie arguments in the same chapter. Cultivating land multiplies what it yields, he argued, so that a person who encloses and farms it "does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind," and "may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind." Often that is simply true. But consider the example he chose to prove it: "whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniencies of life, as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated?" The comparison counts the yield of an acre. The people already living on that land appear only as "needy and wretched," and the arithmetic has no column for what they stood to lose. Leaving the losers out of the ledger is the pie-grower's characteristic omission, and here it sits in one of the founding texts of liberal political thought.

Mercantilism. For two centuries, much European economic policy treated a nation's wealth as its stock of gold and silver, and so treated exports as winnings and imports as losses. In 1776 Adam Smith attacked the fixed-pie thinking behind it. "By such maxims as these, however, nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss." Smith also noticed who had spread the belief: "That it was the spirit of monopoly which originally both invented and propagated this doctrine, cannot be doubted and they who first taught it, were by no means such fools as they who believed it." Fixed-pie arguments are often promoted by the people who stand to gain from the restrictions they justify.

Comparative advantage. In 1817 the economist David Ricardo made one of the most counterintuitive positive-sum arguments in economics. Suppose Portugal can make both wine and cloth with less labor than England: eighty men for its wine and ninety for its cloth, against England's one hundred and twenty and one hundred. It might seem that Portugal has nothing to gain from trade with England. Ricardo showed otherwise. If each country concentrates on what it is relatively best at and trades for the rest, both end up with more. "This exchange might even take place, notwithstanding that the commodity imported by Portugal could be produced there with less labour than in England." Even the country that is better at everything gains.

The machinery question. Four years later, Ricardo did something rare: he published a retraction. In the third edition of his Principles (1821) he added a chapter, "On Machinery", confessing that he had been wrong to think labor-saving machinery benefited every class. His earlier views, he wrote, "continue unaltered, as far as regards the landlord and the capitalist; but I am convinced, that the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers." His explanation turns on two of his terms. Net income is what owners take as rent and profit; gross income is everything a society produces, including the part that pays wages. His mistake, he said, was "the supposition, that whenever the net income of a society increased, its gross income would also increase." A machine can raise the owners' income while shrinking the total, and with it the fund "upon which the labouring class mainly depend." In this grammar's terms, one slice can grow while the whole pie shrinks. And he drew the conclusion a pie-grower most needs to hear: "the opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy."

What is seen and what is not seen. In 1850 the French economist Frédéric Bastiat gave the fixed-pie thinker's blind spot its classic statement. An act or a law, he wrote in That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, "gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen." A closed workshop is seen; cheaper goods spread across a whole country are not. The difference between a good and a bad economist, Bastiat said, is that the good one "takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee." His point cuts both ways, though he pressed it mostly in one. The losses that follow a gain can be just as invisible as the gains that follow a loss.

The Chinese must go. In 1878 Denis Kearney, leader of California's Workingmen's Party, published an address to the workers of the country. It begins with a real grievance against concentrated wealth: "the palace of the millionaire looms up above the hovel of the starving poor." It then turns that grievance on Chinese immigrants, in language whose racism is the point of quoting it, and describes the labor market as a pie with no room left: "The father of a family is met by them at every turn. Would he get work for himself? Ah! A stout Chinaman does it cheaper. Will he get a place for his oldest boy? He can not. His girl? Why, the Chinaman is in her place too! Every door is closed." The fixed pie, the thief behind it ("a bloated aristocracy has sent to China … for a cheap working slave") and the language of contamination ("without the contamination of slave labor") arrive together, three grammars in one paragraph. Four years later, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The lump of labour. By 1898 the fixed-pie view of work had a name in British economic writing, the "lump of labour": the assumption that there is a fixed amount of work to go around, so that a machine or a newcomer who does some of it must take it from someone else. Writing in The Economic Review that April, the economist A. W. Flux criticized resistance to labor-saving machinery in these terms: "Spreading the lump of labour thin is a vicious error which entails its own punishment." Flux and the later Ricardo do not contradict each other. The amount of work is not fixed; the people displaced by a machine may still lose. Both are true at once, which is exactly what a mixed case is.

The tariff war. In 1930 the United States Congress raised tariffs on thousands of imported goods in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. More than a thousand American economists signed a public letter urging that it be stopped. Their reasoning, reprinted in 2018 when economists made the same plea again, was a short course in positive-sum thinking: "Countries cannot permanently buy from us unless they are permitted to sell to us, and the more we restrict the importation of goods from them by means of ever higher tariffs the more we reduce the possibility of our exporting to them. Such action would inevitably provoke other countries to pay us back in kind by levying retaliatory duties against our goods." They added: "A tariff war does not furnish good soil for the growth of world peace." The bill became law. This is the third failure described above: each country fighting for its share of trade, and the total shrinking as a result.

The image of limited good. In 1965 the anthropologist George Foster put a name to the fixed-pie worldview in what he called the "image of limited good": the belief, which he first studied in rural Mexico and found in many other societies, that the good things of life exist in fixed supply, so that one family's good fortune can only have come at another's expense. Chinoy and his colleagues, who take Foster's idea as their starting point, describe how such a view "can easily emerge in a world where critical resources and assets are in limited supply." Where markets were thin and growth was slow, it was a reasonable map of a world in which the pie really did stay the same size.

The China shock. For half a century after the Second World War, most economists were confident advocates of freer trade. Writing in 2016, the economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson summed up the theory behind that confidence: "under standard conditions the gains to winners are more than sufficient to offset any losses incurred by those suffering adverse effects from foreign competition." But, they noted, "introductory trade theory also teaches us that international trade is not generally Pareto improving," that is, it does not leave everyone at least as well off. Their research on the surge of Chinese imports from the 1990s onward put numbers on the losers. "Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences," they wrote in the paper summarizing that work. In the local labor markets most exposed to the new competition, "wages and labor-force participation rates" remained depressed and "unemployment rates" elevated "for at least a full decade." The pie had grown. Some slices had not. The theory had always said winners could compensate losers; the shock showed how often they did not.

Each of these episodes was right about something. The funeral seller did profit from deaths. Enclosure did raise yields. Merchants did lose some sales to foreign rivals, and Portugal and England did both gain from trade. Workers displaced by machines and by imports did lose, whatever happened to the total. The error, every time, was never in noticing a gain or a loss. It was in assuming that the part of the story one could see was the whole of it.

How each pole fails

The two poles fail in mirror-image ways.

The fixed-pie thinker treats a transfer as the whole story. A gain is noticed, and where it came from is assumed; Montaigne's "no profit whatever can possibly be made but at the expense of another" is the general form. The visible loss is counted and the invisible gain is not, which is Bastiat's complaint. And because every gain must have come from somewhere, the fixed-pie thinker goes looking for whoever took it, as Kearney did, and finds a thief, which is where this grammar shades into G6.

The pie-grower makes the opposite moves. The first is answering a question about shares with a fact about the total, or about one party's gains: Ricardo's own name for it was his "mistake," the supposition that rising net income meant a rising whole. The second is leaving the losers out of the ledger, as Locke's arithmetic did. The third is telling the losers that their loss is temporary or imaginary. In March 2017, asked by Axios about artificial intelligence displacing workers, the US Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said: "In terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs, I think we're like so far away from that, not even on my radar screen," adding, "I think it's 50 or 100 more years." In December 2019, campaigning in New Hampshire on the move away from fossil fuels, Joe Biden said: "Anybody who can go down 300-3,000 feet in a mine sure as hell can learn how to program as well." One speaker was a Republican official, the other a Democratic candidate; both answered a question about who would lose with an assurance that the losers would be fine.

Both poles share one move: each picks the part of a mixed case that suits its conclusion and argues as if that part were the whole. The evidence from Davidai and Ongis suggests that most people make both moves, on different subjects, depending on which way they want the answer to come out.

Where it borders other grammars

This grammar rarely travels alone.

With G6: The Hidden Hand it shares the fixed-pie thinker's search for a thief. If every gain is a theft, every success needs a conspiracy to explain it.

With G8: Status Anxiety Dressed as Principle it shares positional goods. Much of what people fight over as if it were money is really rank, which no amount of growth can multiply; an argument presented as being about the size of the pie may be about who sits at the head of the table.

With G3: Sacred Values versus Trade-offs it shares a refusal to count. The pie-grower who will not name a loser and the person who declares something beyond price both avoid weighing what is given up. The difference is that the first denies there is a cost, and the second denies the cost may be weighed.

With G1: Purity and Contamination it shares, at its worst, a language of pollution, as Kearney's address shows: the competitor is not only taking a slice but spoiling the pie.

When naming the pattern becomes a weapon

Calling something "zero-sum thinking" is a way to win an argument without having one. If a town's residents say a new plant will raise their bills, and the grid they are on has no spare capacity, they are not suffering from a bias. They may be right. If a worker says a machine will take their job, they may be right too, as Ricardo eventually conceded.

Meegan saw the danger in the paper that named the bias. "There is reason to be concerned," he wrote, "that publicizing zero-sum bias could result in the treatment of accurate zero-sum conclusions as inaccurate." Writing about trade agreements, he argued that it is not enough to say a deal will last only if both sides gain, or that such deals have worked before. "The argument should instead be based on the likelihood that the proposed agreement will be mutually beneficial." In other words: this deal, these people, this place.

The weapon also points the other way. A fixed-pie thinker can dismiss every argument that the total will grow with a single label, "trickle-down," "neoliberal," "corporate talking point," without ever asking whether, in this case, it might. A label that names a real failure in general does not settle whether the failure is happening here.

The pie-growers' failure and the weaponized use of this page's own vocabulary are the same move. Both answer "I will lose" with "the pie is growing," and both treat the first speaker as confused rather than as someone with information about their own slice. The fixed-pie thinker's weapon is the mirror image: it answers "we could all gain" with "that's what they always say."

Catching it in yourself

Montaigne's method still works, even though his conclusion, that every gain comes at another's expense, was the fixed-pie error itself: dive into your own bosom. A few questions help.

Whose loss is my gain? And whose gains do I notice? Meegan found that people track the gains of others more closely than their losses. When a group you dislike does well, do you assume it came out of someone's pocket? When a group you like does well, do you assume it was earned?

Where am I zero-sum, and where am I a pie-grower? Go back to the two questions at the top of this page. Davidai and Ongis found that people switch according to what they want to defend. Make two lists: the subjects on which you think one side's gain is another's loss, and the subjects on which you think everyone can win. If the lists line up neatly with your politics, you have found the grammar at work in yourself.

Which slice is mine? When an argument says everyone wins, ask whether the speaker's slice is the one that grows. When an argument says someone is being robbed, ask whether the speaker's slice is the one that shrinks.

Which parts can grow? Take the situation apart with the four questions above: what can grow, what is fixed in supply, what is positional, and who gets which share.

What would change my mind? If you believe a deal is a robbery, what evidence would show it isn't? If you believe it's win-win, which loser would you accept as real? If nothing would, you have found your position's sacred center, and that is a different grammar: G3.

Tools that help

• F1: The Crux Finder. Locate the specific upstream question the disagreement actually depends on. Many fixed-pie fights turn on one factual question about capacity or substitution, and one question about who bears the cost; neither side's general position settles either.
• B4: The Reference-Class Question. Ask what this is a case of. A new factory, a trade agreement or a new machine can each be compared to many earlier cases, and each comparison carries a verdict with it. Pick two or three, and watch how the answer moves.
• B3: The Trade-off Surfacing. Ask what is given up, and by whom. A positive-sum deal still has a cost; the question is who bears it and whether they agreed to. Its misuse is the opposite error: treating every firm commitment as a mistake merely because it has a cost.

Where it shows up now

As of October 2026, the site is examining this grammar in one live argument. Others are listed as places to look, not as findings.

• The backlash against AI data centers, 2025–2026. Both poles appear on both sides of the fight. In a statement carried in a press release from the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch on March 4, 2026, an organizer for New York City's Democratic Socialists of America called data-center growth "a massive transfer of land, water, and energy from the working class to a handful of billionaires." In a Fox News column on September 5, 2026, the historian Arthur Herman wrote that "the only real beneficiary of a moratorium will be China." Each camp also has writers who deny that its own preferred policy has any losers at all. The full article on this argument: Do Data Centers Raise Your Electric Bill?
• Immigration and wages. Not yet examined.
• AI and jobs, the newest form of the machinery question. Not yet examined.
• Trade and tariffs. Not yet examined.
• Housing and neighborhood change. Not yet examined.
• Selective college admissions. Not yet examined.

Related concepts

• Zero-sum and non-zero-sum. Whether the total of everyone's gains and losses is always zero. From von Neumann and Morgenstern's game theory, which also uses constant-sum for situations in which the total is fixed but not zero.
• Positive-sum and negative-sum. Later terms for non-zero-sum situations in which the total grows or shrinks.
• Zero-sum bias. Daniel Meegan's term for judging a situation zero-sum when it isn't.
• Comparative advantage. Ricardo's demonstration that two parties can both gain from trade even when one is better at everything.
• The Lockean proviso. The condition that taking something is fair only if "enough, and as good" is left for others.
• What is seen and what is not seen. Bastiat's distinction between an action's immediate, visible effects and its later, dispersed ones.
• Potential versus actual compensation. The gap between showing that winners could compensate losers and their actually doing so. Economists' formal version is the Kaldor–Hicks test.
• Positional goods. Fred Hirsch's term for things whose value lies in having more than others.
• Lump of labour. The assumption that there is a fixed amount of work to go around.
• Mercantilism. Trade policy treating a nation's wealth as its stock of gold and silver, and so exports as winnings and imports as losses.
• Image of limited good. George Foster's description of societies that see all desirable things as existing in fixed supply.
• Pareto improvement. A change that leaves someone better off and no one worse off; the test a pie-grower should be able to pass and often can't.