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The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves is going for growth - and yesterday she announced, amongst other initiatives, plans to create Britain's very own Silicon Valley in the region between Oxford and Cambridge. I suppose I should declare an interest - my College and University, which have already played a big part in advances in the sciences and engineering and their application in new technologies, are both likely beneficiaries of any new investment.

Warning voices have been raised - growth should not come at the expense of the environment and our targets on climate. But supposing that is not a matter of squaring a circle, there is a further worry. Silicon Valley maybe a land of fabled wealth, but its riches are not famously well distributed.

The most spectacular story of growth in the New Testament is the story told in all four gospels which is known as the Feeding of the Five Thousand - don't get distracted asking yourself whether the story is literally true since that is not the point. The point comes after the meagre portion of loaves and fishes which Jesus blessed to begin with, have been distributed amongst the assembled crowd. Three Gospels give us the same punch line: 'So they all ate and were filled'.

John's Gospel adds one nice detail in his telling of the tale: he has the loaves and fishes presented by a lad - the only appearance of this word, a diminutive of 'boy', in the whole of the New Testament. The crucial part played by this wee boy seems to me exactly right. In his naivety he hasn't absorbed the grown up assumption that however much food there might be amongst the five thousand, there just won't be enough to go round. The grownups are surely keeping mum about their supplies. The wee lad innocently offers to share his.

Cambridge is good at science and technology - but it's not the only thing we do, and some of this other stuff matters too. One of my most distinguished colleagues at Trinity is Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize winning economist, and amidst the complexities and sophistication of his work on poverty, he delivers a startlingly counter-intuitive and yet simple to grasp message - that the cause of famine is not shortage of food. In any of the major famines he examines, there was always enough food to go round. The problem was its distribution.

Like the little boy in the Gospel, Sen challenges an economy of scarcity based on fear, and bids us imagine an economy of plenty based on fairness - in which all eat and are filled. So by all means, let's go for growth - but let us ensure that any growth we achieve benefits all, and not just some.

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