[slopinthebag]

You should definitely read the book. I'd probably differentiate between modern "capitalism" and the core idea of free trade + private property ownership since they're pretty disconnected at this point.

Today we have a very complex system of private equity, leveraged buyout, and asset management, with the incentive of expansion over production. Mass financialization required the US to outsource manufacturing to cheap labour countries like China, operating two parallel economies - tangible and intangible assets. In the last 20 or so years, half the companies in the US stock market have disappeared, US farmland has shrunk by a fifth and manufacturing jobs have become redundant. The value of assets has exploded, and an ever shrinking group of transnational corporatists have turned the US economy into gambling bazaar, but the house is losing too. Stock market returns are single-handedly driven by AI speculation and the fastest growing businesses are disconnected from real goods. We have an extremely complex economy which looks entirely fake and disconnected from the real world - at least, to a layman, an economist will justify it all. Except the layman is correct. You have to keep in mind that inflating assets benefits the 1% at the detriment of everyone else, and they benefit on both sides of it. Plus politicians can use their free money to buy votes.

So I wouldn't even call modern economies "capitalist", they are their own thing now. We have to wait for the historians to build new frameworks to accurately describe them.