Capitalism (or more specifically, elements of it like private ownership and the market economy) has resulted in the largest increase of living standards in history.
See: China, India, ex-USSR countries like Poland.
See: China, India, ex-USSR countries like Poland.
And the massive increase in living standard can be attributed to multiple factors that was all needed to make it possible, superposition as it is called in physics, e.g. a proper contracting framework, a literate and educated public, technological advances, deregulating markets from the old estates system, etc.
We can take Sweden as a good example, yes the legislative change in 1864[1] that anyone could operate a business was crucial, but where did all the talent come from that actually created all those famous Swedish companies and inventions? Many came from the Swedish Army because Sweden was an old Great Power and the army needed many engineers to be able to build fortifications and such. Two of the most famous ones would be Nils Ericson[2] and his younger brother John Ericsson[3]
But you also need qualified workers and it happens that Sweden had at the time one of the most literate population in the world because of the Swedish state church. In the old days Sweden was quite strict religiously and the Swedish state church had conducted Household Examinations since 1686[4] about general knowledge in the Bible and Luther's Small Catechism. You can't really run a modern industry with an illiterate public.
Thus attributing everything to "capitalism" is gross simplification of history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_of_Extended_Freedom_of_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Ericson
Compared to fifty years ago, are the economies of China and Poland more or less capitalist? And if the increase in the quality of life for those two places isn’t from transitioning from communist/Soviet mechanisms to more capitalist ones, what do you attribute it to?
Describe the whole system, or we're just making sophomoric comments which don't help with understanding. "It's really just capitalism!" doesn't begin to cover the cases.
I also notice that you completely ignored my reply.
I agree that everything can’t be summarized as a simple cause effect, but the parent comment I replied to was about comparing capitalism to communism, hence my usage of examples of states that went from communist to capitalist. In other words, this isn’t theoretical. We have examples of a capitalist state succeeding, when it was formerly communist.
Again, Sweden in the 1800s is not particularly relevant here.
And this is what I don't agree with the reasoning in this thread, it is a comparison of apples with oranges. Many proponents of capitalism does this error, they assume that capitalism gives political rights somehow, and they typically talk about things like freedom and such. But all of those political freedoms stem from somewhere.
And an continuation on that argument is that private companies a free to do what they want, when in reality private stock companies (in the West at least) has a separate legal entity and reduced liability as a guarantee from the state. Is that true capitalism?
Why I made the comparison between capitalism and communism is that both proponents of those systems usually reply "That is not real communism/capitalism!" about any flaw in these systems (which of course happened in this thread as well). But if every flaw is always theorized away, does it then only exist in theory?
If we look specifically at China for instance we can notice other things that has helped it, one is that greedy capitalist from the West moved industries there, China is also doing industrial espionage on Western companies, China as also aggressively spikes its currency, and it balloons it's GDP numbers by building ghost cities.