"Neoclassical economics is a hell of a drug."

The kind of economics taught in intro courses - micro and macro - always seemed to me to be missing a lot.  Like how many truly rational decisions do humans make every day?  It always seemed like a ponzi scheme where you have to keep finding more and more people to buy your product/service. Standing steady is falling behind.  And there was the vast destruction of earth to find and exploit and transport the raw materials needed in production.  And the faith in the bizarre scientific formula:  The Invisible Hand.  And the total lack of ethics as a consideration.  

Then, slowly, within economics itself came people challenging the orthodoxy.  Experimental economics set up actual empirical tests of the previously sacred mantras of market economics.  Then behavioral economics started looking at human economic behavior more carefully.   

That, plus watching the price of text books go up and up and up, made this tweet resonate with me.

Neoclassical economics is a hell of a drug. It has no theory of prices, no account of inflation, and its models all presume the existence of a perfectly rational "homo economicus" who is a "utility maximizer" with perfect information.

1/ pic.twitter.com/A5PhehydHM

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) October 18, 2021

[Click on the Tweet Image to get to the whole thread]

There's a whole thread there that's worth  reading.  It links to a free online textbook called The Economy.  Here's the beginning of the Table of Contents:

Sorry it's not clearer.  But you can go to the book yourself.