‘We must’, said British politician Margaret Thatcher, in a press conference during her victorious 1979 election campaign, ‘increase the slice of the cake before we can decide how that extra shall be sliced up’ (Thatcher 1979a). Two months later, she said ‘in Britain, we spent too much time dividing up the cake’ (Thatcher 1979b). This ‘cake’ (or sometimes ‘pie’) has been commonly used as a metaphor by the advocates of neoliberalism (or at least ‘free markets’) to argue that neoliberal policies have promoted economic growth and made everyone better off. The implication is that giving the rich a bigger slice of the cake is not a problem if the cake is bigger anyway