Migeru:

the real problem is that real growth allows the redistribution problem to be swept under the rug of a growing pie where those at the bottom are happy because their share of crumbs keeps increasing.

Indeed, just as chocolate can make any shit tasty (as they say about sweets industry), obvious growth can mask vile and abhorrent edges and make it all look good. Can you beat a Ponzi scheme in that?

Economy behavior at growth limits is a very undeveloped, yet very important subject. Perhaps the first approximation is already ugly enough that no one would like to come with it openly. Living organisms and other thermodynamic examples show that when adequate resources are cut, functionality is shed in a hierarchical fashion in single organisms, and rather similarly under competition. John Michael Greer points to a study that shows the same pattern in the macro-economic context as well:

... a forgotten classic of political economy [is] Paul Blumberg's 1980 study Inequality in an Age of Decline. Analyzing the downward spiral of the American economy in the 1970s--the last time, please note, that soaring energy prices clamped down on an industrial society--Blumberg showed that while a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling tide behaves in a much more selective fashion, as those groups with more political influence and economic clout are able to hang onto a disproportionate share of a shrinking pie at the expense of those with less.

The decades since Blumberg's book appeared have only sharpened his argument. One after another, nearly every economic sector has undergone drastic reorganizations that slashed jobs, pay, and benefits for everyone below the middle class, and a growing number of people in the lower end of the middle class itself. Now that everyone below them has been thrown under the bus, the middle classes are discovering that it's their turn next, as the classes above them scramble to maintain their own access to the payoffs of privilege...

If there is some private foreknowledge or even synthesis of today's economic situation, that might be a quite natural, almost thermodynamic process, as core control group can have better perception of what is happening, and overwhelming control of information and key resources.