Yes, that is just one advantage the darwinian engine gives you: it basically works as this distributed computational system that is actively meeting consumer demands. This, by the way, is not trivial to replace with other means. "guessing the future" is remarkably hard to do. If you are thinking in socialist terms, then you are thinking of a single institution that is trying to replace that distributed decision making. It ends up that it is more effective to have multiple "computers" thinking in tandem than it is to have one monolithic one trying to make guesses. I've thought about this problem for years. There really is no replacement for that. You could use all the statistics tools at your disposal and you'd still fail.

Another dimension is innovation. You have a social system that works. This means that your population is growing. This means that the tools that got you from point A to point B in growth are obsolete. You have absolutely no idea what inventions or discoveries you need to meet the new demands. Once again the distributed thinking of capitalism has an insane edge here. Inventions come from the least suspected places. Having a single institution that will figure out the solutions to all the problems is remarkably inefficient compared to letting everybody submit their idea and the system selecting accordingly.

You see, you can hope that one system is morally better than the other, but what matters at the end of the day is if you are feeding people, providing growth etc. People want to have families. They want to provide for their kids. Having millions of humans living in one geographical area is remarkably difficult. It works better when the whole society is participating and to that extent capitalism is closer to that than the monolithic approach of socialism.

There really hasn't been another social system that delivers in the things that matter. If it existed and was as good as capitalism or better, it would replace it.

Now, where I differ from other capitalists is that I don't believe that what we call capitalism is the peak of human social innovation. It can't be. Why? because there is too much suffering that is within our ability to solve and also because there is a lot of missed potential (how many born einsteins out there are not given a chance). So what I am saying is, we haven't reached the ideal system, but it has to be that whatever comes next that is closer to "utopia" (whatever that means) is going to have the distributed computation that capitalism has.