Thanks for the reply. It's hard to remember sometimes that if wealth is defined by what humans value then increased choice can lead to more efficient wealth. I'm just having trouble reconciling the fact that wealth is being created when we achieve more efficiently what we want but the overall pie is not increasing. Perhaps the pie analogy has limitations. In your example, the pie wouldn't increase, but it would be a better pie. Does that makes sense? It sounds strange as we are not used to thinking of wealth in terms of "better" or "worse", only more or less.

Now, you could say that there's money wasted on pizza marketing or too many entrants for all pizzerias to survive, so some will go out of business. All true, but those are short run phenomena. Over the long run, the result is greater efficiency.

Yes, this is what I'm thinking of. Too many competitors in the short-term. Is there a point where there are no more efficiencies to be found though? Or the efficiencies are so small as to be negligible? Like having 101 pizza shops vs. 100.

On an intuitive level, increasing the efficiency of production feels more important to me than maximizing efficiency of utility. But both affect wealth positively.