For example, social security relies on economic growth for funding. Meeting real human needs is a lot easier when humans are more productive.
Economic growth doesn't just mean people have more money. It means people are more productive. More productive people produce more goods than they need to survive. Those goods can be redirected to people with needs they can't supply themselves.
Economic growth is what has driven the world to be more fair and equitable over the last thousand years.
As I pointed out, I lived in a country that answered this question exactly like you wanted. It was like living in a country where every institution from the college to the coffee shop was the DMV. It works..just about. But it sucks.
Honestly, I don’t know what more to say than my original question: What do you even mean by “economic growth”? Unless you define that, we’re all going to be talking past each other. It’s not obvious (at least to me) that any mainstream definition of “economic growth” has much to do with poor institutions, particularly once those institutions are developed.
Most businesses (and institutions in general) have more customers tomorrow than they do today, thats economic growth to me. If that doesn't happen, they stagnate, stop investing, innovating and moving forward. The internal incentives get weird and lopsided, lots of infighting starts, and generally all processes slow down (see; DMV).
There is simply no way to "meet real human needs" without economic growth.
You can to a certain extent take from one and give to the other to meet some needs, but that's it, you're just cutting tinier and tinier slivers of a pie that as you specifically said has stopped growing.