… is from page 17 of David Friedman’s 2000 book, Law’s Order:
“Strike” means very different things in baseball, bowling, and labor relations. “Efficient” means very different things applied to engines, employees, and economies.
Economic efficiency can most usefully be thought of as the economist’s attempt to put some clear meaning into the metaphor “size of the pie.” What makes doing so difficult is that the relevant pie is not a single object that we can weigh or measure but a bundle of many different sorts of goods and services, costs and benefits, divided among hundreds of millions of people.
