What we actually see is broad wealth generation that is relatively widely spread (albeit not perfectly uniformly spread) lifting billions out of the crushing malthusian poverty that has been the fate of 99% of humanity, and the creation of social orders in which the rich, while they are rich, have strict limits on their abilities to control the lives of the majority.
That broad wealth generation isn't caused by capitalism, it's caused by technological innovation. Capitalism is just the means by which the rewards are distributed. If we start a company together that increases grain yields, it could either be capitalistic and whoever "owns" the company just pays everyone else wages while keeping all the profit, or it can be cooperative where the rewards are decided democratically and everyone who works there "owns" the company. The latter example is not capitalism, even with the presence of markets!
But as a matter of fact, that's not what happens. What actually happens in the actual real world is:
1. The owner of the company doesn't keep all the profit -- they share out the vast majority of it. (Look at the retained profits vs gross margins of any company you can think of. Look at the wages that you, yes I bet you yourself, are paid).
2. When we don't do it this way, we don't actually get the innovation. The thing that incents people to solve the problems of bringing new products to the public (the very large problems, the problems they can spend the majority of their lives attacking) is the possibility of reward.
1 depends on the industry, some industries are low-margin while others are high-margin. Either way, why don't the people who generated the profit, the workers, get to decide how the profit is divided?
2 isn't true. Not only is most innovation funded by taxes and conducted by public institutions, but it's the market that drives iterative and combinational improvement on new inventions and you can have markets without capitalism. Capitalism is the division of people into capitalists who own the means of production (traditionally factories but nowadays increasingly IP), and workers who work them for a wage. The first step in moving in the right direction, IMO (I'm keen on incrementally and cautiously implementing improvements) would be to ratchet up the number of cooperatives operating within the economy. They're more likely to survive than corporations and they're more empowering for workers.
I'm pretty sure that the way it worked is the vast majority of wealth accumulated with the King and 7-10 people close to the King. Everyone else... was not important to the King. Capitalism is simply an economic system where regular people can own the means of production. It is not about distributing rewards. That is the language of a feudal economy.
A system can distribute rewards just as a person can. If acting in the capitalist economy incentivises specific behaviours, that economy is distributing rewards based on those incentives.
Systems are operated by people, which is why many great ideas on paper devolve into dictatorships, oppression and death in real life. See Ukraine for an example.
Putin's dictatorship is operated by a person, but capitalism is not - it's made of people. Nobody runs the markets, they run by themselves based on people's participation, governed by rules. Invisible hand and all that.
Half my family is Chinese. Expansion of the capitalist sector of the economy has transformed that society and raised hundreds of millions out of grinding poverty and into the middle class, including my wife's family and relatives.
Why did this not happen in India, a country which had many advantages over China starting from 30 years ago? It's because the Indian commercial economy is strangled by socialist inspired bureaucracy and anti-competitive special interests. For all the China claims to be communist, it's commercial sector is cut throat capitalism of a particularly raw form. Much rawer that I would like, Chinese people suffer from some of it's excesses, but nevertheless it's produced an incredibly powerful and dynamic economy.
I don't know whether what you say about India is true, or what socialist-inspired special interests are given that socialism is about removing class distinction and thus special interests, but yeah I agree that Maoist policies were a disaster and market reforms were an improvement. But that's not a surprise to anybody, including Marx - who very clearly said that capitalism was better than dictatorship (or monarchy/feudalism, the only kind of dictatorship prominent at the time). It seems to me that India is just full of corruption given they have both billionaires and crushing poverty at the same time.
My primary political concern is reducing suffering. Capitalism leads to less suffering than dictatorship, but also leads to things like 996 and Chinese factory conditions, and thus should be either moderated or replaced with market socialism.
