March 7, 2017 11:49AM # Kenneth Boulding on the Serious Distortion of Economic Ethics By [Alan Reynolds](https://www.cato.org/people/alan-reynolds) --- SHARE From [Kenneth Boulding](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/20/obituaries/kenneth-boulding-an-economist-philosopher-and-poet-dies-at-83.html), *A Reconstruction of Economics* (NY, Science Editions 1962) pp. 481–82: > “Economic ethics has been seriously distorted by static and short-run criteria of value. ‘Justice’ has been thought of too much in terms of division of a fixed pie than in terms of encouraging the baking of more pies.…The importance of this problem rests on a matter of simple arithmetic: that if redistribution toward any group causes a fall in the rate of growth of national income, no matter how slight, there will be some date beyond which the absolute income of the favored group will be less than it would have been if the redistribution had not taken place.” ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Social Security](https://www.cato.org/topic/social-security), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).