Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days, the US has a Gini coefficient – the most common international measurement of inequality – on a par with slave-owning Ancient Rome. Maternal mortality rates for American millennials are three times higher than those of their parents’ generation – and this in the world’s richest society.

Global life expectancy is falling. So, too, are food standards. Outside a few bourgeois sourdough enclaves, real bread has vanished. In its place we get mass-produced, spongy, tasteless “pseudo-bread” – as Guy Debord lamented in The Encyclopedia of Nuisances. In an earlier age, there would have been bread riots. Now? Just muted indigestion.

What accounts for our complacency? False consciousness, claims McDonald in this sparky polemic against the myth of progress. We have been hoodwinked by elite propaganda. The “progress narratives” of the ruling classes assure us that history only moves forward, that we should trust the system and surrender agency to our betters. Even when protests have erupted, they have mostly sought modest tweaks rather than revolution. But progress, argues McDonald, is a false prophet. History hasn’t followed a tidy upward arc. Moreover, what counts as progress has often produced huge collateral damage, including ecological devastation.

There was a time when human beings had a “commensalistic” relationship with nature, turning on veneration rather than exploitation. Embracing egalitarianism, most primitive societies didn’t have hierarchies of class or gender. Then, around 3000BCE, the “parasitic” economy emerged. Mesopotamians were the first to behave as though nature was no longer to be communed with but subdued. Religion took the place of animism, preaching dominion over the Earth. For McDonald the Epic of Gilgamesh is the first piece of progress propaganda: in it, the eponymous hero kills the forest guardian, tames the wild, and builds a city, filling it with bread and beer to the unbridled joy of his acolytes.

The Book of Genesis follows suit. God commands Adam and Eve to “subdue” the Earth and tame every living thing. Later, Christianity – by then a far cry from Jesus’s radicalism – proved useful to Constantine, who saw in monotheism a handy formula: one god, one empire, one emperor. Fast-forward a millennium, and capitalism picks up the baton. Progress, now secularised, means capital formation: wealth siphoned from the masses to the enlightened few, who return to us the bric-a-brac of modernity – antibiotics and air fryers and suchlike. The logic of extraction remains unchanged; nature and proletariat alike suffer.

McDonald’s book is a satisfying corrective to the smugness of thinkers such as Steven Pinker, who insist that conditions only ever improve. Yet he oversells his case with sweeping judgments. His account of religion, for instance, amounts to little more than a crude reprise of Marx: it’s all opium for the masses, a tool to pacify resentment. But that’s far too simple. From the Peasants’ Revolt to the Taiping Rebellion, Christianity has supplied radicals with a script for inverting power structures.

Equally damaging is McDonald’s uncritical endorsement of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s vigorously contested claim that Enlightenment ideas came from Indigenous America – specifically from the Wendat diplomat Kondiaronk – a theory historians such as David A Bell have dismissed as fantasy. On the latter’s account, the French nobleman Baron de Lahontan wasn’t so much lifting his ideas from Kondiaronk as putting his own progressive views into the mouth of a naïf – a common literary device in the early modern period.

Readers may find all the doom-mongering a bit much. Indeed, there’s a whiff of the swivel-eyed prophet about McDonald. And like all doomsayers, he is sure that the end-times are nigh. “Climate change and ecological collapse,” we are told, “are very likely to cause political fragmentation that nullifies legal and cultural precedents like [slavery] abolition … If market economies continue, there is little reason to assume they will not return to trade in indentured human beings.” Very likely? The confidence is grating and ignores the simple fact that we no longer live in a labour-intensive economy. If anything, AI is making the return of slavery less, not more, likely. McDonald’s dismissal of the possibility of mass investment in nuclear energy in a “neoliberal” world has already aged poorly, with enormous sums being poured into small modular reactors this year. All of which goes to show that the predictions business is a tough one: things can just as easily go the other way.

Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.

Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.

What is “stunning and unexpected”, she told the Hay festival, are the differences according to age, with 60% of men aged 16-27 thinking “women’s equality has gone too far”, more than any other age group.

Gen Z is also more than twice as likely as boomers to agree with the statement that “a man who stays home with his children is less of a man”.

“We have got to get to grips with this, and we have to ask ourselves as feminists a fairly difficult and deep question about whether we have in our rhetoric and campaigning for gender equality been as careful as we should be to explain that actually gender equality will be better for everyone,” she said.

“This isn’t about women getting unfair advantages, it’s about creating a world where nobody is hemmed in by gender stereotypes, and that’s better for men and for women.”

More needs to be done to dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women take men’s jobs, noting that female quotas in Australian politics had proven successful, and that these initiatives are often “sensitive in transition but end point is one that people embrace”, she said.

As chair of Kings College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, she said she would like to feel that there was no longer a need for the organisation, but the “research base is thin” and there was desperate need to “see problems clearly”. “I’m very passionate that we accelerate the pace of change, and good research is critical to that,” she said.

Noting that the World Economic Forum estimates that gender equality around the world is still 130 years away, she said that, in 1998, a person would have more chance of being CEO of a FTSE company if they were named Dave or David than if they were a woman. That has improved marginally since, though Daves and Davids combined with Steve, Stevens and Stephens still outnumber women in the top corporate jobs.

Unconscious biases need to be challenged as research suggests people tend to think that “confident, charismatic men” make the best leaders, when in fact they typically perform worse than more collaborative and cautious women and men, she said.

Kings College London research suggests that the gender split on political views is the biggest it has ever been, with young men more likely to lean right on gender and inclusion issues, whereas women are more progressive.

“That spells trouble for the future of politics,” she said. “We really have to understand what’s happening around attitude formation in young men.”

While she said the drivers remain unknown, she suggested that it may be connected to early exposure to violent porn and “toxic influences online selling a version of masculinity that your manhood is best expressed by subjugating women”.

Although she had wanted to “get on with it” starting her job as Australia’s first female prime minister, she couldn’t ignore the growing characterisation of her building on social media as a “hateful, ambitious, clawing woman who didn’t understand what empathy was, what nurturing was, what kind of woman chooses not to have children”, and was moved to address misogyny head on in parliament.

While research suggests that the traditional media is treating gender in politics better than it used to, she said “the seamy underside of social media has got so much worse”, with abuse primarily targeted at women and in particular women of colour.

“Why do we allow this to happen?” she asked, saying she “can’t believe” it has not yet been possible to design better social media regulation.

While she said she “wasn’t a shrinking violet when it comes to parliamentary debate”, she warned that “we have pushed the pendulum so far now across democracies … to hyper-partisanship fed by the thinness of social media, everything’s a binary, you’re for or against it”.

She advocated “deliberate remedies and measures to put in place political and democratic systems that take us away from that” such as involving citizens more in shaping decisions and other forms of direct democracy.

She suggested reconfiguring parliaments to allocate members’ seats randomly, so they are not sat in adversarial opposition, but would be encouraged to form bonds with each other.

She also recommended the Australian model of compulsory voting, as well as the preferential voting system, meaning if you vote for a minor party as your first choice and it is eliminated, your second vote still counts.

Asked about whether female leaders would improve progress in mitigating climate breakdown, she said the fact that people now for the first time believe their children’s lives will be worse makes this challenging.

“It’s very hard to get people to come on big change journeys and show the social solidarity needed to do that if they no longer have faith that we can build a better future together.”

In the 20th century, the definition of progress seemed clear. It was growth, measured in terms of national income, or gross domestic product (GDP). And that growth was to be endless, an ever-rising curve. No matter how rich a nation already was, its politicians and economists would consistently claim that the solutions to its problems – from poverty to pollution – depended on yet more growth.

But this promise has not been delivered on. It is clearly time to reimagine the shape of progress and, with it, the policies that could bring about prosperity for a fractured humanity on a destabilised planet.

First, it’s useful to recognise the appeal of growth. It is, after all, a wonderful, healthy phase of life, which is why people the world over love to see children, gardens and trees grow. No wonder the western mind so readily accepted it as the shape of economic progress, too, and simultaneously adopted the very 20th-century mantra that “more is better”, both personally and nationally.

Yet if we look to nature, it’s clear that nothing succeeds by growing for ever: anything that seeks to do so will, in the process, destroy itself or the system on which it depends. Things that succeed grow until they are grown up, at which point they mature, enabling them to thrive, sometimes for hundreds of years. As the biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus reminds us, a tree keeps growing only up to the point that it is still capable of sending nutrients to the leaves at the outermost tips of its branches, at which point it stops. Its pursuit of growth is bounded by a greater goal of distributing and circulating the resources that nurture and sustain the health of its whole being.

Although we can easily appreciate the limits of growth in the living world, when it comes to our economies, we have a harder time. Thanks to the availability of cheap fossil fuel-based energy in the 20th century, rapid economic growth came to be seen as normal and natural, indeed as essential. Its continuation over many decades led to the creation of institutional designs and policies – from credit creation to shareholder dividends to pension funds – that are structurally dependent on growth without end. In other words, we have inherited economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive.

This requirement has become so locked into economic theories, political narratives and public expectations that, over recent decades, we’ve witnessed desperate and often destructive measures designed to reboot growth when it becomes elusive. Governments deregulate finance in the hope of unleashing new investment, but often end up unleashing speculative bubbles, house price hikes and debt crises instead. They promise corporations that they will “cut red tape” but end up dismantling legislation that was put in place to protect workers’ rights, communities and the natural world. They privatise services – from water to hospitals – turning public wealth into private revenue streams that often undermine the very services they claim to provide. They add the environment into the national accounts as “ecosystem services” and “natural capital”, assigning it a value that looks dangerously like a price. And, despite committing to keep global heating “well below 2C”, they open up new avenues for fossil fuel exploration, while failing to make the scale of transformational public investment needed for a renewable energy revolution.

Instead of pursuing endless growth, it is time to pursue wellbeing for all people as part of a thriving world, with policymaking that is designed in the service of this goal. This results in a very different conception of progress: in the place of endless growth we seek a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home. And since we are the inheritors of economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, a critical challenge in high-income countries is to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether or not they grow.

Tackling and reversing inequality needs to be at the heart of a new eco-social contract. Not only does this bring benefits in terms of improving life satisfaction; it helps us reduce the size of our national ecological footprints, via the well-documented links between greater fairness and more moderate consumption. It’s also important politically: one of the most damaging consequences of growth-driven inequality is the concentration of wealth and economic power in the hands of a few. This power can all too easily be converted into influence over elections and the policymaking process, ensuring the preservation of a system that advantages the already wealthy.

When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it would take to deliver social and ecological wellbeing, through an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design. There are many possibilities – such as driving a low-carbon, zero-waste industrial transformation, with a green jobs guarantee, alongside free public transport, personal carbon allowances, and progressive wealth taxes. Policies like these were, only a decade ago, considered too radical to be realistic. Today they look nothing less than essential.

This is an edited extract from a foreword to The Poverty of Growth by Olivier De Schutter (Pluto). Kate Raworth is the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (Random House Business).

Further reading

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel (Windmill Books, £10.99)

Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes by Ha-Joon Chang (Penguin, £10.99)

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson (Routledge, £19.99)