It's the
individuals who invent the things that are truly the most worthwhile, and the small groups surrounding them who bring more prototypes into reality. The kinds of new things that can become universally desirable without so much actually needing to disrupt anything old or established.
The capitalists might still be able to offer the best leverage to approach universality, but 50 years ago their currency was drastically debased like everyone else up and down the food chain.
These are losses that have never been recovered, but it still left the surviving capitalists in much stronger financial control relative to everyone else. Millions more citizens of a quite smaller country were pushed downward into more survival-type activities in place of the structure which had allowed the benefits of increased productivity to trickle down. There was great pressure to reverse the flow of that wealth trickle, which eventually prevailed and grew exponentially, it became more & more of a "consumer economy", trickling up. Until the vast majority of individuals' generational resources that could be allocated to innovation have been tapped out along with all kinds of other stores of wealth which is the only way a recovery at the top could be expected possible in the fewest decades.
Capitalism is not the problem when it benevolently leverages innovation, the damage is done when it leverages greed. It does not have to be ugly if you can truly afford better, and have the conviction to carry it out.
But the more financial control and resources you have access to the more money you can always make doing carefully crafted financial deals involving existing wealth, most people in that position are less likely to accept something new anyway.
So you really need inspirational amounts of resources to permeate much deeper into the population because you need so many millions more people empowered to work more innovatively if they so choose, because that's where you find the potential to turn "nothing" into something to begin with. Very few will actually make the absolutely incredible breakthroughs, so you need millions to whom it is just plain more within reach.
Probably about like when a single-income semi-skilled paycheck could still support a homeowning or suburban family lifestyle. Even if it's not the suburban-living crowd you expect to be doing the innovating. Sheesh, that's about 50 years behind us too isn't it?
When Wells Fargo is sitting on kilos of gold, there's always going to be people who are so impressed that they can see no value in anything else. Especially not turning nothing into something, when there is so much wealth already accumulated there to desire or get their hands on in some much more expedient way. Even more so when almost nobody has any gold at all unless Wells Fargo shows up and puts some on the table. If there was ever really enough to go around, why you wouldn't need Wells Fargo at all anymore.