I would argue capitalism just so happened to be our method of progress. It was more so humanities newfound like of education and reasoning that did it. Or, conversely, the decline of religion in the state marked when things started to look good for humanity. And then it's a pretty clear graph where less religion = more good from then on until now.

> I would argue capitalism just so happened to be our method of progress

Personally I strong believe that (free) competition was the actual real "force" behind it. It just happened that capitalism (however flawed) provided the best environment for incentivizing individual and groups to compete in a "productive" way, accumulating capital in a reasonably regulated and fair way, instead of treating the world a zero sum game (i.e. in premodern societies usually the only real option you had if you wanted to gain significant wealth besides inheriting it was taking it from other people through force or coercion). Stable legal, societal, economic environments (also things like patents, copyright etc.) created ways to reward innovation and other societally productive enterprises.

When I say "fair" I of course mean it in relative terms (and even then that limited "fairness" was almost exclusive restricted only to members of your own society). But it was a huge improvement over arbitrary despotism, societal and economic, instability and various misaligned incentives that preceded it (e.g. possibly why the Roman empire didn't really progress past the "proto-capitalist" stage).

IMHO Socialism and similar systems have a major flaw (besides the fact than they can't really exists without excessive coercion) in that they stifle competition and don't tend to incentive/reward behaviors leading to growth and innovation.

Not that monopolistic-corporations etc. are any more likely to behave any differently without strong incentives, or that non-profit/government funded/etc. organizations can't produce anything innovative or societally beneficial or are somehow inherently worse at that than profit seeking companies (often the opposite). However again they need incentives to not consume/waste all the resources they get without providing anything in return and the need to compete (or lose funding/end up privatized) with the private sector often (again in relative terms, compared to any alternative systems I can think off) provides those incentives.