* Advertising promises us salvation but is designed to keep us feeling unhappy

Giles Fraser
"In politics, as in business, growth is the name of the game," so Gavin Patterson, the president of the Advertising Association, welcomed the trendy crowd of ad execs. It was the theme of the whole conference: we, as an industry, contribute massively to economic growth. The secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Maria Miller, was there to pat them on the back. I played the pantomime villain. Growth is not so much the solution. It is part of the problem.

Back in 1928, John Maynard Keynes delivered a now famous address to students at Cambridge University called The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren. Worried that communism was becoming increasingly attractive to the students of his alma mater, Keynes described capitalism as fundamentally a utopian project. He predicted that within a century growth would multiply the standard of living in the UK by between four and eight times.

When this took place, we would all lead a life of semi-leisure, thus relinquishing the pursuit of material gain. Growth was simply a means to an end. It would herald a return to the Garden of Eden. Here Keynes waxes theological. Like the lilies of the field, we would no longer spin or toil.

Keynes was roughly right in his forecast of economic growth. But completely wrong about a return to Eden. Explaining this, the father and son combination of Robert and Edward Skidelsky – distinguished economist and philosopher – point to a simple distinction that Keynes overlooks: that between needs and wants. Needs, they argue, are potentially limited. There are only so many meals you can eat in one day. Only so many rooms you need in a house. Only so much warmth you require to survive. In need terms, there is such a thing as having enough. Wants, however, are insatiable. Imelda Marcos could always have more shoes. Growth can satisfy needs but never wants.

And wants are the natural territory of the ad execs. These people can make us want things we never knew we even wanted. Thus the need to keep on growing. So Eden is permanently elusive. This is how it works: I was in my garden the other day, pottering about in my old jeans. Kicking a football. Doing nothing in particular. Then I slumped down in front of the telly and the ads came on. The message was subtle and insidious.

This life you have now – it's just a bit shit really, isn't it? If only you had a new this or a new that. That's what thin, beautiful successful people have.

The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has this remarkable criticism of Christianity. "To act as a physician," he writes, "the priest must make one sick!" In other words, before Christianity can present itself as the answer, it first has to generate the problem, or "poison the wound". Before people can be sold salvation they need to be persuaded that they require saving, that their existence is miserable.

Advertising does something similar. Before it can present Westfield shopping centre as the answer, it must first create the problem. Advertising wounds us with the message that our current life is rubbish, and then asks for our credit card number as way of making things right. This is much more a version of paradise lost than paradise regained.

The whole thing is a set up to keep us unhappy and foolishly intent on spending our way out this unhappiness. It's a trap that shifts growth from a means to an end to an end in itself. And what is most immoral about all of this is that the more we squeal about our own (artificially generated) wants being unmet, the more the genuine needs of the vulnerable are being ignored.