I see this argument trotted out and it's a huge dodge that implicitly acknowledges the zero-sum nature of capitalism as practiced by modern societies. It's true

I see this argument trotted out and it's a huge dodge that implicitly acknowledges the zero-sum nature of capitalism as practiced by modern societies. It's true that global quality of life has increased and the examples you gave are true. But it's critically important to note that in many developed countries quality of life within that country has stagnated or regressed on many key metrics. If the only we way we can make the world richer is by making the rich countries poorer, I don't think it's a shining endorsement of that social system. We already have many other social systems that can do about the same thing. I've always found this to be a massive flaw in analyzing policy from a Pareto criterion. Economists love to show the very simple arithmetic that a Pareto improvement is strictly better but my intuition was always that the theoretical increase in total surplus didn't actually lead to a better real outcome.