> Saying "capitalism is the best system ever" is like saying there are no black swans. Saying capitalism is "good" merely requires the existence of a large number of white swans, or at best more white swans than black swans.
I don’t follow the logic here.
You should come into this knowing that you have a bias towards favoring capitalism, as you are not only living within that system but very likely benefiting heavily from it. You should also come into this knowing that you have a very limited scope to weigh alternatives, as you don’t have much real world data, and all historical data is heavily tainted with both your biases, as well as the filtered through lenses of your current system.
Imagine your self to be an astrophysicist, this is akin trying to compare our sun to a star that is on the other side of the galaxy directly behind the sun, without having many instruments or even a telescope to observe the latter. Whenever you try to look at that star, 99.9999% of all the light you see is coming from our sun, not that star, and you have to account for that when comparing them.
Saying that capitalism is good and backing it up with a few stories, also ignores all the stories which demonstrates that capitalism is bad. For every story of your penicillin—which isn’t even that clear cut, but let’s ignore that—there are stories like the Bhopal disaster, the climate disaster, of wage theft, of poverty and exploitation, of people dying of preventable and curable diseases, etc. Those are the black swans in the system, and they are all over the place. People arguing that capitalism is good are choosing to ignore these stories, and focus on the penicillin.
Saying that “capitalism is good” based on observing white swans, should follow with “capitalism is bad” based on observing the black swans. A scientist like Sabine Hossenfelder should know better.