[lo_zamoyski]

If capitalism is about meeting market demands apart from any objective sense of quality, then yes. It's basically curve fitting.

The reason things are shittier is because the market is shittier. Consumer demands shape what companies make and sell. If companies can get away with selling garbage, because the market is undiscerning, then they will make garbage.

It's the same with politics. Ultimately, the quality of a political culture is determined by its participants.

The real problem isn't capitalism, but consumerism, which, among other defects, prioritizes the maximization of quantity over quality.

[senderista]

But capitalism helps create consumerism. Demand is manufactured, not just met.

[lo_zamoyski]

That depends what you include under the definition of "capitalism". I think a minimal definition - private property, profit motive, market exchange - doesn't necessarily entail consumerism. You need to include additional factors like the cultural/moral context and the political order. Liberalism + capitalism can easily degenerate into consumerism, because the state here takes a permissive moral stance toward vice.

In any case, no one is inducing new basic appetites into the market, but seizing on (often through deception and manipulation) existing appetites. "Keeping up with the Joneses", for example, exploits envy and other covetous vices in the populace. Indulging vices naturally feeds those vices which can entrench a culture that normalizes them.