its difficult to say that that has been the key to that in my view, because the primary mechanism by which this has happened has been a spread of industrial infrastructure (and thus both automation and the capacity to trade more things with other places) into areas where it was previously lacking, which has a tendency to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce many common goods and thus their relative price. Making more things and for cheaper is likely to reduce poverty under just about any economic system, and theres nothing about industrial development that implies that it must be done under capitalism, so I dont think we can say that it was key so much as one of the options, which most places have gone with.

That being said, say for the sake of argument that I accept this, that capitalism has been the key to driving a lot of people out of poverty. Would that actually change anything that I had said previously? The notion that a transition to capitalism has lowered poverty, and that capitalism inherently promotes poverty arent contradictory, if the conditions that the capitalism replaced trend towards an even higher level of poverty than capitalism does. Under that circumstance, you would expect to see a dramatic drop in poverty when first adopted, but then for that progress to stall without poverty’s elimination once the level that capitalism trends to under the circumstances is reached. Were the question something like “would you prefer to live under capitalism, or something like feudalism or an authoritarian command economy?” then sure, it’d be the least bad among these. But its still not good enough, and if nothing else we’ve tried has got there, then if we want the actual elimination of poverty, which I think we should, we’re going to need to experiment with new ways of doing things.

but it’s worked better than anything else we’ve tried

I am not a fan of the CCP at all, but the amount of people they’ve lifted out of abject poverty in the past 30+ years has been staggering.

So no.

Capitalism isn’t a “vague boogyman”, capitalism is an obsolete system, that is implemented globally and is the cause of most world problems such as inequality, poverty, climate change, overwork, lack of individually and nearly all misery in the world.

Thanks!