Business
A healthy economy sits in a band between two limits. Below the inner limit, people go without essentials like food, housing, healthcare and a political voice. Above the outer limit, humanity puts more pressure on Earth's life-support systems than they can bear, so success means meeting everyone's needs without crossing either line.
A single number for total economic output tells you nothing about whether people's needs are met or whether the planet is being run down. Economics should start from what humanity actually wants to achieve over the long term and judge success against that. The tools come after the goal, not before it.
It is a hopeful assumption that inequality first rises with growth and then falls on its own. It does not reliably happen. Fair sharing has to be built into how an economy is designed from the start, not left to arrive later as a side effect.
The belief that richer economies will eventually clean up the pollution their growth caused is not borne out. An economy needs to restore and renew natural systems as part of its normal running, rather than harming them first and promising repairs later.
Market theories celebrate trade and self-interest while leaving out the unpaid household work that feeds and raises the people doing the trading. When that hidden care isn't counted, the economy looks self-contained when it actually rests on it.
One camp says growth is necessary, so it must be possible. The other says growth is impossible, so it cannot be necessary. Both let their wishes decide the facts, and the sounder stance is to stop depending on growth while staying open about whether it happens.
Being open-minded about growth is not the same as opposing it everywhere. Low- and middle-income countries still need significant growth to give their people the basics. Whether growth is good depends on which side of the limits a country already stands.
Today's economic decisions still follow theories built decades ago around endless growth. Those theories were not designed for what we now know about ecological limits. Keeping them means making decisions for a world that no longer exists.