Kinda depressing that marketplace efficiency is more compelling than moral/ethical good, but I guess it is a sign of the times.
The more efficiently we allocate resources, the more we lift people out of poverty around the globe. Increasing marketplace efficiency is the headline story of the last 100 years of human history.
Billions of people are now living indoors with electricity, have running water, reliable food supply chains, and are killing each other less due to marketplace efficiency.
You won’t hear that story on the news of course.
But it wasn't Russia. It was China. And China did it by privatizing and opening up its markets to capitalism (and by capturing the subsequent efficiency gains). Not by command-and-control allocation of resources by a central body.
China lifted roughly 850 million out of extreme poverty over the past 30 years according to the World Bank...more than the 6X the population of Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China
Yes, the main objective of business is wealth maximization. But to create wealth (without stealing it), you must create value for other people. Theft is a zero sum game. Value creation is not. The search to create value by millions of different individual actors is how resources are so much more efficiently allocated in free market economies.
Russia has still reduced poverty by roughly 10-20% since the fall of the USSR via more open markets. The reason this number isn't even larger, is because of widespread theft (see the above paragraph) by a corrupt oligarch class. This is super common in any country with lots of oil and no democracy (ask Venezuela for more info).
We’ve burned through millions of years worth of stored solar energy in the last 100 years, and not yet paid the full price for that.
That’s essentially a massive injection of capital into our system. Of course that would raise the standard of living.
Does the market have any sense of what needs to be done to preserve our goals as a species. (What are those exactly, anyway?)
Attribution of moral goodness to something that has circumstantially caused some good but lacks any moral compass doesn’t seem to be a solid rock to found your religion on.
And there are certain things that we disallow (and in fact revile) that strictly speaking would be more efficient market wise. (Buying and selling people, child labor, stuff like that).
Although capitalism deserves its due (which is a fair bit), attributing all of recent human progress to it seems a bit much.
You could also say the same thing about humanity itself.
In any case, we're not talking about religion. We're simply talking about outcomes, and which are more favorable. In a majority of cases, the outcome of an efficient market is superior from a moral perspective than the outcome of individual humans running things.
As to the problem of fossil fuels, the market will inevitably solve for this too. If polluting the earth with fossil fuels ends up killing humanity--that wasn't a very efficient use of resources was it?