Proponents of what? Growing the pie isn't going to convince anyone who has a small slice of anything. Maybe you've never seen a pie before, but no matter how much it grows by the angle of your slice remains the same. People don't care about how much absolute wealth they have. If they did they'd all be happy as even the peasants today are richer than the kings of yore. In reality, people are only concerned about having a smaller share of the total wealth than someone else. Those kings of yore, despite having less wealth, are still considered to have been better off as they held the large share of the pie.

Ah, the "let them eat iPhones" argument.

No, cool tech does not make up for the ruinous cost of health care, housing, and education vs median wages. Maslow's Hierarchy still exists. A system that fails to deliver food and shelter for a reasonable number of worked hours at a reasonable and available job is still a failure no matter how cool the Big Screen TVs are.