The current system has been responsible for creating actual abundance that has vastly improved the living conditions of the vast majority of people. Scarcity is the default state, not artificial.
Capitalism seems more or less benign in affluent nations which can afford to value individual life at millions of dollars. You can rest assured that the homeless people you ignore aren't going to starve, that they'll just buy drugs with the money you'd have given them anyway. It's easy to squint your eyes and believe in the system.
It's much harder to look at countries were life is much much cheaper and accept that the system is a net improver of lives rather than one of enforced stagnation. Where getting people fed, clothed and housed is a matter of politics, not logistics. Everywhere you go in the developing world, you see politics, by that I mean rich people preserving their riches, keeping the people willing to do the legwork and work out the logistics, from following through on their altruistic missions.
We need to stop pretending the system designed to make people feel better about exploiting whatever they can in self-interest is the arbiter of human worth.
Scarcity could go away tomorrow if the rent-seekers could just get out of the way.
Global living conditions across multiple facets have DRAMATICALLY improved in the last 200 years. No, I am not talking about the last 10 or 20 years, I mean over many generations: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.
Which board? What implementation of capitalism? You don't pretend that the States are running a free market or anything absurd like that, do you? The States have a Crony system at best.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism. I think humans are a rotten animal at heart and capitalism is the only way to effectively harness that bad nature for good results. But like any technical system, the implementation matters, and the implementation in the States in the last 50 years has been dreadfully short-sighted.
We have gradually whittled away at every collectively positive subsystem for generations now and are left with an inordinate number of miserable people whose day to day life would show up as, 'improved' on the Pinker style charts & graphs.
The subjective is the core of wellbeing.
Objective reality matters, certainly. But all the more so when you apply nuance to your reading of it.
Solving the abundance problem was the high priority as distribution was purely theoretical concern until we achieved abundance. It took us about 200,000 years develop the ideas, technology and to put the infrastructure in place to achieve post-scarcity for food and water.
