This is just a quibble. Economic rationality, I take it, is roughly the tailoring of means to the fulfilment of subjective ends in the case of choosing what to buy or to sell.

True, a brainwashed person can think logically about the contents of his indoctrination. For instance, a terrorist can choose to blow up a plane as a means of fulfilling Allah's will. Is the terrorist rational? In a narrow, amoral, instrumental sense, perhaps.

But what if the terrorist came to believe that Allah has a will because the terrorist was tortured and threatened with death if he should renounce the religion he grew up with before he was old enough to think for himself? Now, would it still be fair to say that this terrorist is an independent calculator of the relationship between means and ends? Wouldn't it be more accurate to think of this brainwashed person as the puppet of a cult?

The same applies to consumerism and to the outsized role of associative ads. It's less drastic because there's no torture or death threat here, but the point is that what's at stake is the orthodox economist's rosy, idealistic view of capitalism, which is at odds with the reality.

You said earlier that economists have ways of modelling networked goods, and so forth, but that's not in dispute because economists help themselves to an endless supply of models to cover all possible bases. My point isn't that economists can't model advertising; rather, it's that advertising doesn't fit so easily into an economic model that lends support to capitalism. Thus, the models that celebrate capitalism as a self-regulating system will tend to oversimplify or to ignore how ads work.

Your paragraph on heterodox economics is an anecdote. Is there some official record of how most economists work? Are there dominant schools of economic thought, and is there proof of some such consensus?