Writing in 1931, the great economist, John Maynard Keynes, thought the major problem of this generation (that of his possible grandchildren) would be how to entertain ourselves, how to live ‘wisely and agreeably and well’ because he thought ‘the economic problem’ would have been solved: we would have enough material goods.  He was talking about Europe, not the poor colonies, of course.

And we do have enough: for example, average income in the UK is  around £25,000 or nearly three times the world average, and 60 times that in Afghanistan. We have enough, but Afghanistan and  most developing countries clearly do not.  That we have enough is shown by surveys showing we – in rich countries – don’t get happier when we get richer.

More important is the environmental issue: growth eats up the world’s resources and generates carbon with seemingly inevitable and catastrophic effects on the climate.

There is a simple tautology:  world carbon use depends on the size of the global population multiplied by the amount of carbon required to generate output (or income) – depending on the available technology – multiplied by income per head.  We are already at the edge of the precipice in terms of the safe amount of carbon in the atmosphere. To save ourselves and secure and sustain a planet which is livable in we have to work on all three variables in the tautology: there are limits to changes in population growth over the medium term, although the rate of increase of world population is decelerating; and we are making some progress in developing and adopting new carbon-saving techniques, but not nearly enough to ensure a sustainable planet. That leaves growth in output. World growth has to slow down.  Yet clearly this slowdown should not come from poor countries that need growth to reach tolerable living standards for all. Given that the world has a limited amount of resources, we must share them fairly across the global population.

We in the rich countries could well be satisfied with what we have now (augmented over time through non-carbon using technological progress), especially given that increasing incomes are not making us happier. Yet any such slowdown in the growth rate of rich countries will not be possible or acceptable if we continue to have the present unequal distribution of incomes.

In rich countries, for the mass of the population the main motive for accumulating more income is to catch up with richer people and enjoy their life styles. So long as the incomes and consumption of the elite continue to rise – often involving new and fancy products – then all those on lower incomes will want more too. But it’s a treadmill. With inequality, especially if it’s rising, people never do catch up.  Moreover, with high and rising inequality, we can’t solve problems of poverty in our own societies without higher incomes.

In addition, poor countries too are motivated by wanting to catch up with rich countries; so long as rich country standards are rising the catch up gets more and more difficult and requires more and more growth.  And within poorer countries, the same catch-up motive applies as within richer countries. But here growth is more urgently needed, since so many have such low incomes that they are living abysmal lives.

In short we have a system that makes growth an imperative; but this growth involves huge environmental threats and doesn’t improve our real well-being. To counter this we need a radical redistribution of income, within countries and between them.