Here’s the conundrum: No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one.

In contrast to Pareto’s pyramid and Kuznets’s rollercoaster ride, its essence is a distributed network whose many nodes, larger and smaller, are interconnected in a web of flows.

Out of all of these power relationships, when it comes to the workings of the economy, one in particular demands attention: the power of the wealthy to reshape the economy’s rules in their favour.