This is well said, and I have been very frustrated by this in recent years, too. The simplest clue I have is to look at who benefits from this perspective, and what means they have to spread this idea in the public sphere and discourse.
Start with the billions of people lifted out of poverty. Never in history have so many people enjoyed such a high standard of living.
The market isn't perfect and it isn't magic, and I don't mean to minimize climate change and other tragedies-of-the-commons, but in practice it's been very successful at improving peoples lives.
I thought that the financial system was the consequences of wealth rather than the cause (otherwise this doesn't explain why none of the African stock exchange are fighting with NYSE for the most attractive stock market)
Wealth inequality is a side effect as some people do better than others.
And even looking at history, the motivations of scientific development seems quite varied. War has been a key promoter of many fields of science, which has in turn lifted may people out of poverty. So we should have more world wars?
You might chalk it up to power structures, but that couldn’t explain the disparity in standard of living between the Soviet Union and Western Europe.
The system not only encourages but requires inequality. Today's billionaires accumulated that wealth off the back of countless toiling workers, many doing so in miserable conditions.
Why is it so clearly capitalism that lifted those people out of poverty, and not modern advances in technology, such as in food production, efficient transportation of goods, sanitation, and medicine?
Because of the evidence of India and China is compelling.
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/
And in fairness, 'capitalism' is a very imprecise term which often means different things to different people.
So if the open market would be the only reason of the progress we should've seen something similar in the two countries.
The only similarity that they both share is a growing disparity between high income class and low income class
Also Chinese policy is more towards open trade than open market. I feel that complicated topic such as progress can't be condensed into one action that can deliver the expected results. In fact is always a combination of policy that bring the desired effect