Thats not really accurate. The rest of the curriculum is about how that is still correct but how people attempt to gain market power so they can stop others undercutting them, bringing market back to efficiency.
Mainstream neoclassical economics is mostly preoccupied with what ought to happen in some mathematically defined fantasy world and business school is the study of what actually does happen.
In fact when you get into post-graduate classical economics, it's mostly just a formal branch of mathematics with models and axioms. It's got nothing to do with how people actually engage in the real world with the distribution of resources.
It's based on some mathematically defined homo-economicus and has a bunch of assumptions like infinite knowledge, exclusively rational and always correct based on some utility function calculation, etc... as if every single person, without exception, pours over arbitrarily complex excel spreadsheets covering a wide variety of properties for every single purchase and they all, in unison, arrive at the exact same conclusions and without any more thought immediately respond to the price signal. Oh and they also are acting only in their self-interest without any regard, at all, like some kind of narcissistic psychopath, for anything but themselves.
That's why the advanced economics books are just proofs, axioms and math while the business books are things like real world sales numbers. Classical Economic theories predict real world human behavior about as much as an astrology chart. (There's lots of revolutionary work in economics in the past 30 years that present other models but many people outside the discipline haven't gotten the memo yet and think James M Buchanan and other Virginia and Chicago school people from the mid-20th century are all of economics - it isn't and never was)
I've given a pretty good multi-year study into both. One of them reflects reality more.
Price signal is real, don't ignore it. $100 packs of gum won't sell ... unless they do (https://www.mastika.store/products/mastika-gum-gold)
It's part of the "4-6" ps of marketing. (usually price/place/promotion/product - sometimes people and presentation). As you can see in that link, those things are part of it.
It's way more complicated than sellers stupidly slashing their profit margins in some purely competitive feeding frenzy for your dollar. That does happen - but usually only in collapsing markets where price, speculation, information, and value are counterintuitively all unknown.
Robert Shiller has documented this, how the predictive capacity of neoclassical models reach their highest accuracy during market panics. So there is that
Take auto insurance... probably the biggest TV advertiser in the US. Highly regulated product, nothing tangible, it's all the same. But the gecko and Flo and Jake from State Farm are there every commercial break to pound your head in to differentiate their product from alternatives. Doesn't hurt that price discovery is painful in this industry, they know it is unlikely you'll compare more than 2, mayyyyybe 3, companies.
Meanwhile there's essentially zero marketing for health insurance in USA, because people have no choices, the employer chooses for you.
Once you stop thinking about what they actually care about, you're drifting away from a successful execution.
This is from copy to code. From price to presentation to features and flow.
It's not a nice to have or something that's tacked on, it is the soul of the product in the prospects mind - the driving force for the whole effort from the first keystroke to the last signoff from QA, your product lives or dies by your market models and theories and how focused your execution of them were.
Doing this right is the difference between Creative Zen, Apple iPod and Sandisk Sansa or FirefoxOS, Android and MeeGo.
Technical competency is a necessary ingredient but it doesn't get you there alone.
If you want to build something that doesn't bomb, you need to study marketing, significantly and heavily.
I really don't think it's possible
Classical economics are impoverished frameworks for dealing with the richness of human experience.
It discards reality, replaces it with simplicity and then re-presents it as reality.
There is no constructable Valhalla that will follow the rules.
What we have isn't a fall from grace of some theoretical perfection.
It's an unrepresentative mathematical model that has at most coarse correlation with fungible markets.
I always encourage people to analyze the code for various backtested trading bots of you're really interested in how these markets actually work
People generally miss fundamentals and don't account for a moving store of value, they often assume its constant. Economics is marginally only used to sell something often with deceit in mind on someones part.
As for what's driving inflation, its obvious its the fact that government is spending more than they have each year, printing the difference, and have now gone gangbusters with manufacturing spending to offset china imports.
They are also printing money to buy back bonds to control yield curve in lockstep with other central bank currencies (you see these fluctuations in the relative value of the currency).
The corruption, fraud, and graft that this money is funneling to have become so large that its inflating the dollar as its not necessarily creating economic activity. Rising interest rates have stressed the already overleveraged companies to the point they are shutting down or massively laying off.
Some producers base their prices off a business as usual approach. Others project profit sufficient to normalize against changes in the currency price level and any additional expenses/shortfalls in supply chain problems during the short term. While prices may be inflexible for some things, that's only if there's no shortage and the product is available.
Also, you have distributors refusing to do business with smaller companies (as has been seen with a couple of the small time farmers). They want shortages, so they can have an excuse to charge more. Classic characteristic of stagflation and lack of antitrust.
All of this can only get up to a point before food becomes relatively unavailable, and then everything hits the fan.
They generally aren't that monolithic.
You seem to be conflating shortage and scarcity, which generally aren't the same.
It's an interesting theory but I'd like to see some evidence.
For instance, the general consensus is the supply chain issue is from Lean manufacturing which, although has a lower overall cost, trades that off with a much lower tolerance for disruptions. It presumes availability and it turns out these supply lines were both much longer and more delicate then presumed.
You can see that in practice. Monolithic traditional manufacturing didn't have such issues. Things like paper products for instance. When the demand for toilet paper shot up in March 2020, the supply was able to meet it within days, compared to the years for electronics and automobiles.
These are pretty studied topics in the journals. You seem to be interested. They're pretty approachable. Go check them out.
Scarcity is just a given in a scarce world. The perception of shortages on the other hand acts similar to static versus dynamic friction. Once things get moving they become less sticky.
Most of the issues originate in one industry, that says it doesn't pick winners and losers, but consistently does at the tax-payer's expense. They also have a very sordid history as a private institution and to date have never met their chartered mandate. I've read a lot about the history of the Fed.
The supply chain issues rely on cheap labor and cheap transportation that were optimized in many respects for single points of failure due to cost savings. If your an authoritarian regime you usually have both. I've worked as a System's Engineer, and we always look for these in any system for improved resilience in the design.
The lack of silicon processing is a special case, and underlies the complexity of manufacturer; the same issue affected both electronics and automobile shortages. The methods of manufacturing are much more specialized and fault intolerant in the former (because only 1 company supplies the dependencies, ASML) than the latter (paper).