Upper-middle income and high-income nations – countries over the threshold of $10,000 per capita – could in theory deliver flourishing lives for all, achieving real progress in human development, without needing any additional growth in order to do so. We know exactly what works: reduce inequality, invest in universal public goods, and distribute income and opportunity more fairly.

It’s high-income countries that are the problem here, where growth has become completely unhinged from any concept of need, and has long been vastly in excess of what is required for human flourishing.

It’s not growth itself that matters – what matters is how income is distributed, and the extent to which it is invested in public services. And past a certain point, more GDP isn’t necessary for improving human welfare at all.

From the perspective of human welfare, the high levels of GDP that characterise the United States, Britain and other higher-income countries turn out to be vastly in excess of what they actually need.

As societies become more egalitarian, people feel less pressure to pursue ever-higher incomes and more glamorous status goods. This liberates people from the treadmill of perpetual consumerism.

If the rich have more money than they can spend, which is virtually always the case, then they invest their excess in expansionary industries that are quite often ecologically destructive.

Any policy that reduces the incomes of the very rich will have a positive ecological benefit. And because the excess incomes of the rich win them nothing when it comes to welfare, this can be accomplished without any cost to social outcomes.

Growthism is little more than ideology – an ideology that benefits a few at the expense of our collective future. We’re all pushed to step on the accelerator of growth, with deadly consequences for our living planet, all so that a rich elite can get even richer. From the perspective of human life, this is clearly an injustice. And indeed we have been aware of this problem for some time. But from the perspective of ecology, it is even worse – it is a kind of madness.

Those who insist that aggregate growth is necessary to improve people’s lives force us into a horrible double-bind. We are made to choose between human welfare or ecological stability – an impossible choice that nobody wants to face. But when we understand how inequality works, suddenly the choice becomes much easier: between living in a more equitable society, on the one hand, and risking ecological catastrophe on the other.