Over a decade has passed since the hey-day of Western assistance to the post-socialist transition countries. We can now look back and clearly see the role that the ideology of conventional economics played in the transition. Again and again, pragmatic alternatives were ignored in favor of an institutional blitzkrieg or shock therapy to quickly “install” textbook/cartoon models of legal and economic institutions with extensive negative consequences. This history is critically reviewed but, more importantly, we also outline the intellectual basis for pragmatic approaches to social learning.
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