The 1920s meeting where economists decided Americans needed to want more

By the early 1920s, American factories had gotten almost too good at their job. Machines could produce more food, clothing, and shelter than people actually needed, and workers, sensing they finally had enough, started asking for shorter workweeks instead of more pay. Two groups panicked. Moralists worried that idle hands would lead straight to sin. Industrialists worried that slower buying would stall economic growth.

The solution both groups landed on, as Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez lay out, wasn't to let people rest. It was to teach them to want things they didn't need. A new field called marketing was built specifically for this purpose. In 1929, Herbert Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes wrote it out almost gleefully, wants, the report said, are almost insatiable, and one want satisfied makes way for another, giving the economy a boundless field before us.

Henry Ford agreed from the other direction, where people work less they buy more, he said, because leisure hours were exactly when new wants would surface, wants the economy needed people to keep filling. By 1955, retailing analyst Victor Lebow put the goal into words that still sound startling, we need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it was hidden. It was a deliberate campaign to convert a population that had enough into a population that always wanted more, dressed up in the language of standard of living so it would feel like progress rather than manipulation. Even the vocabulary shifted to support it. Robin points out that people stopped calling themselves citizens and started calling themselves consumers, a word that, by its own dictionary definition, means someone who uses up, wastes, and destroys.

The reason this history matters isn't nostalgia. It's that most of us assume our wants are simply our own, private, personal, arising from nowhere but ourselves. Knowing that an entire industry was built, on purpose, a century ago, to manufacture exactly this feeling of insatiable wanting makes it possible to ask a genuinely useful question about any specific desire: is this mine, or is this the machine working as designed?

Pick one thing you currently want to buy and trace the want back to its actual source, an advertisement, a comparison with someone else, or a real, practical need. Pay attention this week to language built to nudge your spending, phrases like disposable income, and translate them back into plain words before they influence you. Before your next purchase, ask what hidden cost, to the environment or otherwise, might be sitting inside that price tag without showing up on the receipt. Finally, find one upgrade you've simply accepted as normal, a bigger version of something you already have, and deliberately decide to skip it, just to see how it feels to opt out of a want that was never really yours to begin with.