The problem is the ingrained definition of efficiency. If people are happy and the society is moving forward culturally and scientifically, I'd say that's an efficient society; but american capitalism has a built-in definition that isn't necessarily tied to those values. It so happens that because of dynamics of the markets and people, it's had a pretty good alignment with the former values (when coupled with western democracy) -- cruically, better than the comunism alternatives -- but it's becoming clear we can do better with a more engineered approach specially in low scarcity scenarios.