TL;DR: economists are still stuck in the idea of the market as a perfect force for reaching optimal outcomes. They’re ignoring the simple fact that businesses are putting prices up purely to increase profits. And that they can do this because the economic ideal of perfect competition (where many small firms compete with near-identical products) does not exist. We have a small number of very powerful businesses—oligopolies—in nearly every market for consumer-facing goods.
That last statement is one view of one theory (that happens to be the predominant one), it’s not like this is a fundamental tenet of economics.
But you might like behavioural economics and doughnut economics as alternative views that don’t hold the individual as rational actors.
Exactly. There is science-based economics and there’s also pseudoscience economics. They exist next to each other. It’s a similar situation as in medicine.