A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.
Secondly, I'm not sure we should so quickly even concede your point. What if The Enlightenment, mathematics and science, and democracy were actually greater contributors to lifting humans out of poverty? All the greatest advancements in mathematics and science (think Einstein) don't appear to be profit driven.
But just because it's powerful, doesn't mean it goes in the direction we want. It did, mostly, for the better part of the last two centuries. But more and more, we now find ourselves at odds with where the market wants to go. This is the issue we have to deal with - our present economical engine becoming incompatible with a better future.
It's not like the market economy is some distinctive, separate force from humanity; it's made up of people. And perhaps frustratingly, it's made up of all of those who participate, and not by diktat.
I think what maddens some is that masses of people sometimes make decisions we don't necessarily agree with, and often with information we don't think they have. We want change /now/, and that's just not possible with massive systems of people.
So we may look at issues of inequality today and issues of budgets and austerity and whatnot, and assume that we're all heading for the end. But as you insinuate in your earlier comment, man has steadily increased their economic output for centuries. The quality and longevity of life, over time, has increased inexorably. We can't confuse the turbulence of a decade with a scope over centuries.
But all of this I feel is somewhat moot. Because for as many calls as there had been for greater control over market forces, be it mercantilism of the 18th and 19th centuries, or socialism and communism in the 20th, we find that we're still, wherever freely possible, conducting business by barter and exchange, gathering wealth, and acting in our own interests. We do this because it's natural, because it requires no direction from elsewhere, or guidelines to follow that someone else sets. Place a person in whatever place and she or he will try to make themselves a profit.
We can only be frustrated to a point with the way things are, because to go further is to refute who we are. Freedom is desired naturally, be it in rule or economics. Best to help things remain open and fair, and not try and set a direction. People will find the best one for themselves.
* It occurs to me that it's possible you might not be a Marxist, but the argument you're making is one often put forward by Marxists, along the lines that capitalism by establishing monetary systems to measure capital establish scales on which poverty is measured and therefore create that poverty. Of course every Marxist society ever created has also used a monetary system to measure and allocate capital. But then Marx never, in any of his publications or letters, ever described how a communist economy would actually function so obviously building one has proven somewhat problematic.
It is worth looking at his comment with the "red" filters removed. The point is that every game has winners and losers. You actually can't have one without the other, by definition. One creates the other.
The real question is just how far do you want to tilt the board before all of the pieces fall off? Money is just a representation of material and effort. Do you really want to leave the decision about where all material and effort are spent up to those who figured out how to win this game? To some degree that's fair, but to what degree?
Remember: there are no self-made men. Anyone who thinks this is deluding themselves. We exist in an interconnected net, where everything is related. There is not one thing sitting within arms reach of you right now that you made completely by your own hand. You are standing, at all times, on the shoulders of others. Hopefully this is a true circle, where those at the top allow those on the bottom to stand on their shoulders.
Of course this is true. The company I work for was founded by, and is run by very successful wealth members of the top 0.1%. The salary I get from that company feeds and clothes me any my children, provides us with a car, holidays, health care, a pension plan and all the other trappings of western civilization. Just because I work for them doesn't mean I have in any way 'lost'. I have gained massively. I hope they go on winning so they can employ even more people like me.
When my wife arrived in this country, she got a bottom-of-the-ladder job at a coffee shop. Within 2 months she was an assistant manager. She used the money she earned to support herself and pay the course and transport fees to go to a community college 'access to nursing' course and now 13 years later is head nurse at a specialist fracture clinic. Everybody won. They got a hard working Barista, and she got the resources she needed to build a successful career and their customers got great tasting coffee. Nobody lost a single thing.
If so, then the point is wrong, because Game Theory[0]. With very few exceptions (e.g. futures and options contracts, IIRC) trade - that thing markets do - is a positive sum cooperative game, that is to say win/win.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game#Non-zero-sum
Both sides can certainly win in a futures contract and often do. A farmer sells his future crop now at a discount so he can buy fertilizer he couldn't otherwise afford, but without which there would be less crop to sell. Meanwhile the future crop buyer gets the crop at a discount. Win-win.
Pure financial derivatives trading can generate absolute winners and losers, but they know that getting into the game, and the advantage for commercial participants is that the 'gamblers' increase liquidity in the market.
It's the way we corrupt each of them which is the problem, corrupted by people who want power. There's no way we have found of solving that yet. None.
So far, that we're still alive seems to be pure luck, and that we make it out alive or not, seems to also be pure luck or bad luck. We certainly ain't helping ourselves all that much.
We have four billion more people than 50 years ago, and more people have jobs today globally than at any other time in history, and less people are in poverty, and there's more food available for everyone, and famines are almost non-existent, and the infant mortality rate has been drastically reduced, and the global life expectancy keeps rising, and a hundred other things that prove you wrong.
Lot's of dictatorships have called themselves "socialist", maybe you are confusing the term?
Capitalism and socialism works exceptionally well hand-in-hand.