[jerf]

There's something very cognitively tempting about "People are not entirely rational actors, therefore people are entirely irrational actors", but it's not true. The rational actor model is incorrect; this is beyond dispute. However, it is still largely correct, and it remains more correct than many of the naive models that people rush to substitute in. The economists of the past did not use that model because they were stupid; they used it because it is the most accurate tractable approximation that was available to them.

Also, economics is quite radically value-neutral; if you come to enjoy using deodorant, even if you've never heard of it before it was advertised at you, you are still obtaining utility and value from purchasing deodorant. There's no morality in the "value" that is used in economics, no decision about whether a person "really" gets value out of an item or not. It is also a very cognitively tempting idea, that one can declare oneself the arbiter of what is "true value", but if you actually try to use it in the math the model completely fails to match reality. You may feel free to create your own such definition; I unashamedly have one myself, we all do, really. But it's not what economics use, because it doesn't produce useful results.