In The Culture of Contentment, his critique of economic complacency, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that although we should beware too uncritical a view of the lessons of history, one that is ‘most nearly invariant is that individuals and communities that are favoured in their economic, social and political conditions attribute social virtue and political desirability to that which they enjoy. That attribution, in turn, is made to apply even in the face of commanding evidence to the contrary’. Essentially the same point has also been made about the failure of western economists to face up to the de ciencies of their own theories and policies by Paul Omerod in a much more closely reasoned critique aimed directly at economists themselves. Omerod points to the questionable premises of orthodox economic theory, the inconsistencie s and gaps in the theories derived from those premises and the failure of them to produce coherent policy prescriptions that work. Yet like Galbraith he is struck by the paradox that ‘to the true believers, within the profession itself, the ability of economics to understand the world has never been greater’. Indeed there seems to be an inverse relationship between the degree of failure of economics and belief in its capacity to succeed, ‘sociologist s and psychologist s have documented many case studies concerning the reactions of groups when views which they hold about he world are shown to be false. In such situations , far from recognizing the problem, a common reaction of individuals is to intensify the fervor of their belief’. Both Galbraith and Ormerod are primarily concerned to an attack the economic basis of policy in the West but such considerations appear to apply with even more force to the countries of the transition in the former Soviet bloc. There the idea of the Washington consensus, now transformed into a post-Washington consensus, continues to be pushed as a cure-all to the regions’ problems, ‘in the face of commanding evidence to the contrary’. This paper attempts to extend these arguments to the way in which the transition in the Soviet bloc has been conceived. We rst review some of the