Capitalism and its pyramid type qualities requiring an ever growing number of consumers, but on the other end having technology delivering labour efficiencies which result in less jobs for those required consumers eventually doesn't end well and what you are seeing by the decay of modern economies is its slow demise think its bad now fast forward another 10 or 20 years, Gorbachev never thought capitalism was a great idea, he just felt communism was a worse one and appreciated that the two could not co exist. However he did believe capitalism would eventually evolve into a form of corporate governemnt socialism. This is slowly happening now as countries no longer pay attention to debt, and outside of IT and sport the chances of getting rich are pretty much non existent as small business cannot battle the scale and tax advantages of corporates.
Yes capitalism works so poorly that even ghetto dindus have access to goods and services that were unavailable to even the richest of the rich just a few years ago.
The only areas where it doesn't work is where there is excessive government intervention: education with out of control tuition costs, the financial system with government sanctioned money printing and healthcare with the same. The excessive intervention also prevents new industries from getting started when old ones become obsolete. That's where you have the unemployment problem. People were saying the same things about jobs when farm technology was taking over. Meanwhile there's four times the population of that era and we have an obesity epidemic among the poor.
