that the reward system is broken is clear to everybody. but i am not sure you can build a "well functioning capitalist system" given the previous 400 years of experiments with it.
I remember watching an online lecture series on economics once and part of it had live demonstrations of market forces where the people who valued the thing they wanted to obtain more than the currency required to obtain it wound up with those things, and then they went through some graphs of how the maths of that all works out in theory. This was a model from classical economics. I remember thinking wow that's such a beautiful and cool model. Then lecturer turns around and says despite the fact the graph from the model matches our live demonstration almost exactly, it turns out things don't work like this in the real world. The reason being that a reasonable number of people lie, steal and otherwise cheat, and it turns out the effects of that are somewhat non-trivial.
It made me realize that the effect that bad actors have on the free market are actually quite significant. I've also realized over the years that when you look deep enough, not much of anything is "well functioning".
That mechanism is printed money untethered from a hard-to-fake backing, aka hard Money. Hard money advocates say that printed money that loses its value over time screws up all kinds of incentives by more easily rewarding bad behavior like political corruption, and punishing good behavior like saving and not investing in things one doesn’t understand deeply.
It shouldn’t be surprising that printed money leads to people getting more reward for positioning themselves closer to the money printer. I don’t think it should be controversial that most of us invest in things we don’t remotely understand, like businesses we are totally unqualified to operate and manage.
But this is, in fact, the kind of opinion that gets you mocked and ridiculed by educated elites.
(to understand this book properly I think it helps to recall that Orwell was on scholarship ["outer party"] to bring up the exam scores at a boarding school that otherwise catered to the rich and thick [cream of society — "inner party" sprogs]; many scenes in 1984 can be traced back to the posthumously-published Such Such Were the Joys)
I'm pretty confident we can say this about every economic system. But we can't really say who has saved the most because we can't do very good A/B testing or really any good causal analysis. It is important to remember that economics is not a hard science and most "experiments" are either in the lab (and we gotta question scaling) and natural experiments, which means its difficult to come up with causal explanations.
Historically, everyone dies. The right question is “which systems have produced the most new wealth for their participants” and there’s a clear obvious winner there: private ownership and free trade.
Is that the right question, though? Just the sum of the wealth produced, with no concern to how that wealth is distributed, the effects it had on the population or any externalities?
There are wide differences in human flourishing even among capitalist societies, so it may be better to look what other ingredients make the most difference, aside of private ownership and free trade.