The free market ideology has spread to many countries around the world. It has increased prosperity for many in the developing countries.

What is this prosperity? It is an improvement in living conditions - in well-being and material goods. People are paid for their work, and they use this money to buy goods and services that they need, and want - goods and services produced by other people. The free market is the means by which these goods and services are transferred around the world.

To be able to continue this, we need to consume. If we consume more we need to produce more, which means that more people are assured their jobs. If consumption decreases, production will decrease too and there will be less work around. So we are told to consume more and more by our political and business leaders. These people determine their success by an increase in the Gross Domestic Product. This is a measure of how much activity - how much goods and services are being produced. As long as it is increasing, society is succeeding.

We have trained our workforce well. Our education system is the way in which the system propagates itself. We are training our young to a world of work.

How did we get here? An essay by Jeffrey Kaplan in The Gospel of Consumption traces a history of how we came to be the consumers we are,

President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

Here was "a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones." By encouraging people to want more, more work would need to be done, and the machines would not be idle.

There were some critics to this new policy of increasing consumption to allow more people to work. Because machines were now able to produce more in less time, a few argued that people should therefore work less - a four-day working week. As early as 1932, Arthur Dahlberg, in his book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism,

By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in, the profit motive becomes both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs. For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.

Kaplan makes the point that what was going on was a political movement by government and business leaders to build a system that kept people employed. We were persuaded by these people, and although the machinery offered an opportunity to work less,

.. we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labour, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.

The J. Walter Thompson advertising agency told readers that under “private capitalism, the Consumer, the Citizen is boss. He doesn’t have to wait for election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer ‘votes’ each time he buys one article and rejects another.”

This was and still is the American way, Kaplan,

We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg’s six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet.