This article is based on Chapter 14 of 'An Economy of Want', the e-book of which is periodically free to download.

Our free-market economy has an in-built drive to continually persuade people to want a bigger variety of things and more of them.

In recent years, the level of production appears to be limited by a ‘want’ shortage – there are not enough things for the rich to desire sufficiently to get them to spend their money. Accordingly, much of current economic activity is devoted to inflating society’s desires: dreaming up new things to want and intensively marketing what already exists.

What gets made affects the nature of society. In the past when human productivity was far lower, what got made could be more reasonably seen as the result of consumer choice because most consumption would be for the basic human needs – food, clothing, shelter. But many products in today’s economy are dreamt up by corporations whose only motivation is to generate more and more ‘wants’. To what extent are consumers really making independent choices, as opposed to finding themselves more akin to putty in the hands of the corporations?

Driving us crazy with desire

An economy devoted to inflating society’s desires - "driving us crazy with desire" - might sound rather exciting, until you realise that the desires promoted are for one brand of washing powder instead of another, for a sugary fizzy drink or a plastic sports shoe. To extract the most profit from the market, companies want to mark up the price of a product as much as possible (i.e. sell it for much more than it cost to make) and sell it in large numbers. Thus, the advertising industry is dedicated to making you desire a product so much:

• that you will buy more of it, even if you hardly have a use for it or don’t need it at all;

• that you will pay more for it;

• that you will choose it even in preference to other cheaper products of equal quality.

Businesses seek out all possible opportunities to encourage the consumer to spend. They build huge shiny shopping malls. They use every means invented to get at the consumer day and night, subjecting us to a barrage of propaganda: paper mailings, billboards, illuminated digital billboards, adverts on the sides of buses, on stations, in the metro, in sports stadiums, on sports and celebrity clothing, radio adverts, TV adverts, cinema adverts, adverts in smartphone apps, on websites, via social media and email, in newspapers and magazines. They target the vulnerable: films for kids with associated branded merchandise; junk food with excess salt, sugar and fat, in packaging decorated with characters from TV and film; supermarket shelves full of these tempting products placed at head height of the targeted kids.

But it’s not just the advertising industry trying to drive us crazy; it’s a very large part of the global economy which produces less than it could because our society doesn’t ‘want’ any more: it has run out of wants/desires. Of course there are lots of people who do desperately want things out of genuine need and may even be going hungry, but they don’t count since they produce no ‘demand’ in the economy if they haven’t got money. The people who could produce demand are the more wealthy who have money piled up in their bank accounts and can’t think of anything that they want to spend it on. Accordingly, companies are motivated to dream up more and more products in order to tempt the wealthy to part with their cash. The result is an avalanche of products and services, some of which are genuinely useful, interesting or fun, while others reach levels of ludicrousness or pointlessness that can be hard to believe.

While the rich have the most to spend, the poorer part of society is not completely ignored, with shops full of countless cheap knick-knacks (small worthless objects) which might tempt those with only a few dollars to spare. Betting shops and slot machines are common even in run-down suburbs.

Since humans are chimpanzees’ closest relatives, we unsurprisingly have some rather similar interests - substitute getting mugged or run-over for the lions. However, if comparing us to chimps isn’t to your taste, you could refer to the five-tier model of human needs known after its originator as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. To sell products, the market explores all of those human needs that it can, stimulates them to the maximum and exploits them to the full. All profitable segments of the market get attention, so minority interests are catered for including ‘refined’ tastes in the high arts. But mass marketing goes for the guts, the basic drives we all share – everybody has a stomach! Thus for example the plethora of junk food and sugary drinks that is causing so much damage to health. It's only one example of negative effects on well-being - others are explored in the book.