ABSTRACT
The economic man in the marketplace of conventional economics is an individual without culture and therefore without existence. The consumer is always sovereign when casting dollar votes in the marketplace but to be feared when casting votes in the political process. C. E. Ayres's institutional economic theory discusses the power of ideas to shape economic policy. The ideas that Ayres criticized have drawn their sanction from tradition and still persist in their ability to misdirect public policy. Arguments about the neutrality or nonneutrality of price theory or about the significance of technology in economic change have been the root and branch of the controversy between conventional and institutional economists. Government economist's advice inaction on inflation and unemployment since, as they admit, they do not fully understand the causal forces. The divorce of economic theory from any substantive theory of needs or values makes economists' pronouncement on needs quite without content, that is, meaningless.
