Here's the thing. The average person only cares about their economic growth up to a point. Study after study has concluded that once most people have "enough" money, adding more does not bring them any more happiness (with the rare exception of a increase being so substantial that it radically improves their social status -- let's say by at least an order of magnitude).
And studies have shown that people become unhappy when confronted with people who have significantly more than them - simply put, envy.
Therefore, one can easily argue that if economic growth is coupled to ever-increasing inequality, it actually begins to reduce overall human happiness after a point -- and if you "read the room" around the world, I'm pretty sure humanity has passed that point.
Just take a look at how society is structured today, where a 1% difference in achievement at some arbitrarily determined age can lead to a difference in expected lifetime income that is orders of magnitude larger. And that's not to mention the kind of personal wealth that, due to the properties of exponential growth, cannot help but grow, regardless of the competence of its owner.
Die-hard capitalists argue that this is the best economic system that we've ever had, but our sample size is very limited. We've only been trying this out for a minute fraction of humanity's existence, and the effects of this system have not reached a steady state. If the past few decades are any indication, capitalism has made the world worse off in many ways. It enabled our ancestors to leave us with many major unsolved problems, with blissful ignorance - issues that are given token acknowledgement in economics classes as "externalities," a term that doesn't even begin capture how important they really are for humanity's future.
I posit that overall human happiness plotted against economic inequality is maximized somewhere in between strictly enforced equality and the extreme levels of inequality that we see today. It doesn't take a genius to see it, but no one really talks about the middle. Perhaps sanity is too boring for this generation.