Advertising Makes Us Unhappy

Via Havard Business Review, University of Warwick’s Andrew Oswald compared advertising spend and happiness across 27 countries over 30 years:

When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier—and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant—there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there… I think it’s rather intuitive that lots of ads would make us less happy. In a sense they’re trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more on goods and services to ease that feeling.