I honestly don’t know what the difference is between these two.
This is a bit fraught. I would be surprised to learn that people’s standard of living generally improved throughout the ancient, antique, and pre-modern eras. In fact, it’s likely that the move from hunter-gatherer cultures to agrarian lifestyles caused a decrease in standards of living (he says with glee in his eyes). And I’d guess that feudalism and other pre-modern economies were generally far worse at resource distribution than ours is. Markets have been a thing for a very long time and capitalism’s primary contributions to economics are probably the introduction of labor markets and the sense of manufacturing capital as an investment. It’s definitely true that those things may not be critical to the operation of economies and there are better ways to provision labor and share ownership of capital. But I don’t think there’s any question that capitalism fostering a non-aristocratic mercantile class and at least weakening the back of hereditary oligarchy wasn’t critical to global flourishing. I do really hope we can move past it, but it’s really hard to see how the power dynamics inherent in capitalist economies (i.e. the checks and balances that permit the exercise of power but hold back aggrandizement) can be replicated in more cooperative arrangements. At least not without a more coherent and pervasive social ethic of cooperation and a robust system for correcting anti-social behaviors.