Yep.

Muddling through with markets, democracy and welfare.

Global life expectancy was 34 in 1913. Today it's 70.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Global GDP was less than 1Trn until about 1800. In 1950 it was 11.7Trn . Today it's 157 Trn. In a life time it's gone up by more than 10 fold.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...

People are living longer, richer lives all over the world.

The world's largest country grew at 7.8% last year.

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/why-indias-strong-gdp-gr...

Things are getting better. Look at the data, work at what you do and ignore the doom sayers.

You could've asked that about people saying we want 8 hour work days, sick leave, and safer work 100 years ago, and yet we got them.

Patent system?

I know lot of folks on Hacker News hates patents but that was the whole point of them: the patent holder got exclusive rights to the invention for 20 years. But the trade off was that specific details about the invention, how it worked and how it's made were entered openly for anyone to look up. The patent holder would basically benefit it for the majority of his or her life but then after that it was permanently part of the public domain.

AFAIK it was the reason why the patent system was invented, otherwise the best option jealous guarding of trade secrets that ideally (for the secret holder) died with them.

Only realistic capitalist nightmares.

It’s telling that you think treating people with respect and dignity is “socialist”.

In a sane society it should be easy to argue against that claim, but looking around in the US at least, it turns out you’re correct: that doesn’t seem to be the norm under US-style capitalism.

Luckily we have other countries to provide an example here.

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Why is socialism a pipe dream? Unions and co-ops aren't pipe dreams, and if we had nation wide unions or converted most businesses into co-ops, we would arguably be living under a socialist economy. If people had direct voting power over economic and business issues that would be socialism.

Some methods are more realistic than others, but I don't see a requirement for any outlandish ideas.