> To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.
Human health is also a component of that inequation. How are you factoring that in with profit?
Also, all of that growth is meaningless unless it somehow makes people healthier and happier. So I would say that having a huge and successful healthcare industry is one of the goals of the rest of the economy (as are food production, entertainment, knowledge production and others).
So, if we have enough wealth but not enough healthcare, food, fun or knowledge, than we can trade some of that wealth for more important things, like healthcare workers, or garbage collection, or agricultural work, or mathematics research, etc. Or child care, though I suppose you view stay-at-home parents as deeply unproductive by this measure.
That only works because the data doesn't take into account any kind of shared wealth. Large swathes of people lived in tribal communities which had different concepts of ownership and property, but were not 'poor' by any common definition from their times. GDP data completely ignored these types of societies, which formed the majority in some areas of the world before colonization. Even then, most of the escapes from poverty have happened in state-run, dictatorial China and in the newly de-colonized India, so it is very hard to imagine how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.
Also, capitalism without explicit social goals imposed by a state is disastrous. Just look at the USA, with one of the worse and most expensive Healthcare systems out of the developed world, despite having by far the largest GDP (the only fully capitalist-run Healthcare system in the world!).
All of this is not to mention that capitalism is rapidly destroying our planet, with global warming, deforestation,river polution, oil spills, air pollution and other woes being fought for tooth-and-nail by most large companies.
Child mortality rates and mortality rates in childbirth have been c. 20% for most of human history, up until c. 1940.
Almost all human beings for almost all recent history have been agricultural works (over 90% in 1800) which is a severe and precarious state.
If you wish to go before settlements into nomadic hunters and gatherers note that this cannot produce "mathematical research, healthcare, etc." -- ie., the desirable things stated.
At this point you're just pining to be a dog. You may prefer a shorter, more brutal, more violent life... but I think, rather, you just need a fantasy of a utopian "before time" to justify you enmity towards the status quo.
> how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.
Err... when do you think they started their massive reductions in poverty?
When they stopped blaming various other people an liberalized their markets (in china "The Capitalists" and in India "The British Empire"). Within a few years of introducing captialist reforms these societies dramatically reduced poverty.
Human health is also a component of that inequation. How are you factoring that in with profit?
Also, all of that growth is meaningless unless it somehow makes people healthier and happier. So I would say that having a huge and successful healthcare industry is one of the goals of the rest of the economy (as are food production, entertainment, knowledge production and others).
So, if we have enough wealth but not enough healthcare, food, fun or knowledge, than we can trade some of that wealth for more important things, like healthcare workers, or garbage collection, or agricultural work, or mathematics research, etc. Or child care, though I suppose you view stay-at-home parents as deeply unproductive by this measure.