Of course our preferences can change. But if someone whacks my head with a golf club and damages my brain such that whereas I used to loathe egg salad, I now come to love it, would you call that a rational change of preference? No, because the change was physical not logical or even psychological. A golf club physically messed with my brain.

Likewise, advertisers are arguably so sophisticated now that they're learning how to hack the human mind. Hacking occurs where software meets hardware, as a hacker once informed me. Thus, manipulative, associative ads are bypassing our reasoning powers and acting like golf clubs whacking our brains.

If your mind is being hacked, it's not really you who's making the calculation or the decision. So the neoclassicist's individualism becomes misleading. We like to think we're autonomous so we can blame ourselves when we fail and so we can praise ourselves when we succeed, and justify the laws of private property. But that self-image could be more like the result of a modern metanarrative than a scientific finding.

I'm aware that some economists now are working with the social sciences such as psychology. But those are mostly the heterodox economists, aren't they?