To begin, then:

Just for the record, when private capitalism came into being, it was a revolutionary economic, political, and social system that has since fed, clothed, and housed—not to mention educated and cured—more individual human beings than any other system in history. When it appeared on the world scene in the mid-1700s, a person's average life expectancy at birth—in London, the most advanced and civilized city on the planet—was about 20 1/2 years. A hundred years later, life expectancy was three times that number, and it is now approaching four times.