I'll try to explain the terms I think apply here - I'm not an economist but I find the subject very interesting and so read about it a fair amount. I think wha

I'll try to explain the terms I think apply here - I'm not an economist but I find the subject very interesting and so read about it a fair amount. I think what you call "value creation" (growing the total size of the pie) is what economists would call "productivity", and it doesn't include zero-sum wealth capture. The idea that productivity is ultimately what makes a country prosperous and not money or gold I believe dates back to Adam Smith's "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations". If you look at the shortest intro to modern macroeconomics that I know of [1], productivity is still basically the first thing mentioned. The opposite of growing the pie is rent-seeking [2] - trying to get a bigger piece for yourself without growing it. Businesses that face a lot of competition have trouble just unilaterally taking a big piece of the pie, so the focus on this is businesses that are monopoly-like (or at least have a lot of market power). I think some of the courtroom arguments in the ongoing Apple vs Epic trial are essentially about value creation vs rent-seeking. But these two factors tie in to many aspects of public policy - when making projections about the effect of corporate tax rate changes on growth, economists are probably estimating what percent of profits are due to monopoly rent. The reason for doing infrastructure investment is long-run productivity growth. Some countries have implemented a land-value tax because it falls on rent instead of value-creation. The more I learn about economics, the more I feel that our (economic) problems don't really stem from a lack of effort on the part of economists to understand things - I think the obvious things have usually been considered already (although many things are hard to measure). More often the problem seems to stem from sound economic advice just getting ignored by our political processes. [1] https://www.economicprinciples.org/ https://www.economicprinciples.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking