John Komlos — How Mainstream Economics Helps Businesses Manipulate our Minds

A major oversight of standard economics is that it begins the analysis with adults. This is convenient, because this strategy enables the discipline to ignore the crucial and pernicious influence of powerful mega-corporations on the formation of the mindset of children and youth during their formative years. 

By disregarding the crucial first 18 or so years of life, mainstream economics can simply assume that tastes are already formed when a person enters the market place and by then they know perfectly well what they like and dislike.
In other words, they enter the economy as adults with tastes fully formed, so businesses do not influence them in their childhood. The technical term for this is that tastes are exogenous. So economists do not have to worry about tastes because that is determined exogenously, i.e., outside of the economic process.

This dovetails well with the idea of consumer sovereignty,—the doctrine that consumers dictate what businesses produce insofar as they “vote” with their dollars to channel production in such a way as to satisfy their desires. Insofar as tastes are predetermined, consumers express them through their wants, supposedly inducing corporations to produce the right amount and quality of goods in order to satisfy those wants.
In the end, the consumer is king as he/she determines what is being produced. If we would not demand stuff, firms would not produce stuff. So our wants are satisfied and everyone is happy, or at least it is claimed by conventional economists.
However, this model is completely off the mark, because of the unfounded assumption that tastes are exogenous.…

Evonomics
How Mainstream Economics Helps Businesses Manipulate our Minds
John Komlos | Professor Emeritus of Economics and of Economic History at the University of Munich