Why You Want What You Want: Geography and the Dependence Effect of John Kenneth Galbraith

 Why You Want What You Want: Geography and the Dependence Effect

Walk into any suburban plaza in America, and you can watch the Dependence Effect in real time. A store window displays high-end yoga pants, a scented candle boasts "aromatherapeutic renewal," and someone exits with a $300 dog stroller. These are not responses to need. These are carefully cultivated desires designed to feel like necessity.

This isn’t new. It was outlined with eerie precision in 1958 by economist John Kenneth Galbraith. His concept: the Dependence Effect — the idea that in modern consumer economies, wants are not autonomous. They are manufactured by the same system that exists to satisfy them.

"Wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied." — Galbraith, The Affluent Society

Galbraith wasn’t against markets or production. He was against myths. Chief among them: the idea that people enter the marketplace as rational beings with clear preferences. In reality, he argued, corporations use advertising, packaging, and social cues to create demand that previously did not exist.

This reshapes not just economics, but geography.

The Urban Landscape of Manufactured Desire

Think of the structure of a modern city: central districts filled with flagship stores, commercial real estate priced by foot traffic, entire transit systems that funnel people toward retail cores. Or the suburb: sprawling zones of strip malls and lifestyle centers designed not around community, but around the psychology of consumption.

Retail geographies are not accidental. They are mapped along demographic vulnerability: malls in affluent areas, payday lenders and fast food in working-class zones. The physical world is designed not just to meet desire, but to generate and direct it.

"The man who buys what he does not need borrows from himself." — Galbraith, later writings

Today, the effect is amplified by TikTok shopping hauls, algorithmic ads, and fast fashion micro-trends. The geography has gone digital, but the pattern remains: people buy things to keep pace with a manufactured sense of normalcy. We’re not failing to resist consumerism. We’re mapped into it.

Environmental Geography: Waste as a Byproduct of Desire

This also creates a spatial footprint of waste: landfills in rural zones, outsourced e-waste in Southeast Asia, textile microfibers in the oceans. The Dependence Effect is not just an economic distortion—it’s a geographic and ecological one.

Geography students should be taught to see the landscape as a kind of economic text: a mall is not just a mall. It is a site of cultural conditioning, an input node in the system of artificial desire.

So What?

Understanding the Dependence Effect helps explain why inequality persists even in times of abundance, and why urban geography so often reflects commercial logic over human needs.

If a society can be trained to want what it doesn’t need, it can also be trained to ignore what it desperately does.

"The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products." — Galbraith, The New Industrial State

This isn't about guilt. It's about clarity. If you understand the geography of manufactured desire, you can begin to imagine alternatives: community-oriented design, public space over commercial space, shared resources over excess.

You can also begin to want differently.

Comments

  1. David Tyler Rand-McKayJune 25, 2025 at 7:01 PM

    Minute version: Why do you want what you want? That yoga mat, that scented candle, the $300 dog stroller — is that really a need, or something more manufactured?

    In 1958, economist John Kenneth Galbraith warned us about this. He called it the Dependence Effect — the idea that in modern economies, wants are created by the same forces that satisfy them.

    “Wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied,” he wrote.

    In other words, corporations don’t just sell us things — they engineer the desire itself. And geography plays along: malls in rich areas, fast food in poor ones. Cities are literally designed to pull us into consumption.

    And all that stuff? It doesn’t disappear. It piles up — in landfills, oceans, and the air. You’re not failing to resist consumerism. You’re mapped into it.

    So what do we do?

    We learn to see the system.
    And maybe — want differently.

    ReplyDelete

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