Illusion therapy: How to impose an economic shock without social pain

This study attempts to demonstrate how a government launched an economic structural reform plan that previous governments, fearing a serious social backlash, had been unable to implement over the course of 30 years. The findings show that the Iranian government used “illusion therapy”, a package of econo-psychological techniques, to implement IMF-backed “shock” economic reforms to long-standing energy and food subsidies, without facing the expected social reaction.