Century of the Self

[After WWI, corporations] were frightened of the dangers of overproduction, that there would come a point where people had enough goods and would simply stop buying. Up until that point, the majority of products were still sold to the masses on the basis of need...What the corporations realized they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought about products. One leading Wall Street banker Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers was clear about what was necessary. "We must shift America," he wrote, "from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America: man's desires must overshadow his needs."

- from the BBC documentary, Century of the Self. See the film here on Youtube.