Objectively, people are statistically more educated now than in the nineteenth century:

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

> [capitalism's] efficiency is still a steam locomotive though

If you mean "efficient" as in "not wasting resources", you would really have to justify that. For example, for every one kilocalorie of food energy we grow, we spend ten calories of fossil fuel energy. That is surely the reverse of efficiency.

What capitalism is "efficient" at is turning natural resources into products as fast as possible. But that's the thing we have to reverse.

Capitalism is in every way opposed to sustainability. For example, a company has every interest in externalizing as many of its costs as possible, but a future for our biosphere means that businesses cannot externalize costs.

Capitalism has been able to generate an incredibly large amount of goods and services simply by externalizing so much of its costs onto the environment and our descendants. None of those capitalist organizations will end up paying the costs. The owners of these companies will live and die in opulent wealth with never a thought for the future. Everyone else for all of the rest of history will pay for them.

Don't worry though, you are certain to win. I've been having this discussion for fifty years now, though in the 70s I was on the other side. The idea of giving up capitalism or indeed consumption and production of any kind will continue to always be off the table until circumstances, like a drowned and blighted world, force us.

A century from now, in an immiserated planet with a fraction of today's population, people will still be claiming that just a bit more capitalism and we'll be able to regain our former glory.

Consider setting some date in the future, just for your own head, by which if things don't turn around, you will realize that capitalism isn't going to stop.

For me that was sometime in the 90s. But I was still far too optimistic then - I really thought once we started to see gross effects we would actually effect some sort of real change, but here we are, thirty years later, about to yet again emit a record about of CO2 into the atmosphere, almost twice as much as in 1990.

Sorry if I seem angry, but I really hoped for decades we wouldn't destroy our biosphere, and now I can't even con myself into believing there's any hope we won't.