People resist the view that the economy manipulates their beliefs and actions

Evidence

This approach to the economic agent as dupe never caught on, either within economics or in vernacular discourse. Leaving neoclassical economics aside (because it could never condone pervasive massive disconnect between purchases and ends), it is of some interest to explore why average people in pursuit of everyday ends could not be brought to entertain the idea that much of the economy was devoted to the manipulation of their beliefs and actions, in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence. The answer has something to do with another neoliberal technology, this one bound up with the innovation of “murketing.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 390

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why don’t ordinary people accept the ‘dupe’ model despite evidentiary support? The chapter’s driving puzzle — worth following how ‘murketing’ answers it.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior reading on ideology and consent — the question of why publics disbelieve their own manipulation echoes critical-theory analyses of ideological interpellation. — connects to: Preventing the few from drowning out the many is anti-market — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 338; Contemporary economics resists admitting the human tendency to rationalize. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 98