 Roemer is keen not to rerun earlier battles between socialism and the market. Socialists, he insists, cannot afford to neglect the importance of efficiency and innovation in generating sustainable prosperity. He variously: allows that Soviet-style command economies failed; presents Friedrich Hayek as winning the “socialist calculation debate”; and recommends learning from the real-world institutional “experiments” of contemporary capitalisms (where ownership and control are already differentiated, and diverse mechanisms—involving figurative “carrots” and “sticks”—have been developed to tackle principal-agent problems). A strong public sector is likely to be a central ingredient of a socialist society, but socialists are admonished to stop “fetishizing” public ownership, and to be open-minded about possible ownership relations, judging them only by their effects on equality and efficiency (Roemer 1994b: 454–457). Roemer’s own earlier work on exploitation had convinced him that property relations and asset inequalities—not markets as such—are the real problems.