"...new ways of selling more stuff to those at the bottom of the pyramid."

It takes a special kind of blindness not to understand that capitalism's greatest virtue is precisely how much "stuff" those at the bottom of the pyramid get to consume. The whole point of an economy is to get stuff to everyone, and here capitalism is indicted for doing just that.

Implicit in silliness like this article is the belief that there can be an economy that is not a pyramid, one that has no "bottom." But that's just a case of the best being the enemy of the good; no one yet has come close to creating such an economy, because the biosphere is a competitive place, and all of the directed energy that creates "stuff" is driven by channeling competition to produce valuable by-products. In the wild, the losers starve or get eaten. In democratic capitalist states, abundance flattens the pyramid and, through politics. puts brakes on competition, e.g., labor laws and consumer protection laws, and the "losers" are sold "stuff." Under what other existing and stable system do they do nearly as well?

The half of the world that lives on less than $5.50 does not do so in capitalist countries. They live in kleptocratic dictatorships or war-torn shit holes where the people have not learned to compete cooperatively, which is the essence of democratic capitalism. Do you doubt that anyone living in any of those places would change economic circumstances with a minimum wage US worker? Yet you put those people in your critique of capitalism? Do you really think capitalism is why the rest of the world, where there are no workers being exploited because no one will invest there, is the reason for their poverty? (Invaders screwed over indigenous people long before capitalism was a thing, so let's don't go there.)