Don't we already <i>have</i> both? We have a "socialist" component (accepting the paper's terms uncritically for the moment), and we still have private investment for gain in many areas. In theory they complement each other. In practice... well, perhaps not, but I would have a hard time swallowing the idea that it is somehow because of the split, mostly because the deficiencies we observe on both sides would almost certainly still exist even if the alternative system were entirely eliminated.<p>(I would observe, in semi-reply to many people in this thread, that incremental improvement and the relative drudgery of bringing tech to market manifested in real, concrete objects is actually <i>very</i> important. A system that <i>only</i> did "fundamental" research would produce an impoverished society every bit as much as a system that does nothing but "capitalist" work... and measured in man-hours, the "capitalist" work is often harder and longer than the fundamental research. You can tell because small teams can make "fundamental" breakthroughs but the actual act of bringing to market requires further engineering, design, integration into existing large engineered systems, logistics, scaling work, etc.)