A generation ago the range of goods which even the rich might buy was comparatively restricted, and the scale at expenditure for practically every one was moderate. Today there is an almost unlimited range, and although mass production may have put innumerable things at the disposal of the public, the cost of living has not only been enormously increased by them (as in the case of the automobile which absorbed on the average six per cent of the total expense of the University of California faculty), but the constant assault on people’s minds by the most insidious sort of advertising makes these things appear necessities. Mass production requires mass sales, and mass sales require that the public shall be made to believe in the necessity of buying. The ideal of the modern business man is not to supply wants but to create them. America has always been a mass-minded country, and the modern sales manager not only appeals to the individual in creating new wants but enlists on his side the whole force of social opinion. His effort is directed not only at making an individual desire a certain article for itself but at making him feel that his standing in the community and the welfare of his wife and children depend upon their having it. Mass-production salesmanship thus develops throughout all society a vast number of new and formerly unfelt wants, wants based on the things themselves or on social prestige. If these wants are satisfied by purchase the family expense is greatly increased. If the individual resists when others of his own class, and more particularly those formerly considered as in a lower social or economic class, buy freely, he feels himself sinking in the social scale in a country in which the “standard of living” has come to have wholly a[Pg 185] material significance. Moreover, many of these new things, such as the automobile and telephone, become literal necessities, when they become so common as to create a new social life based upon their possession. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter a very considerable part of the increased cost of living is due to the so-called higher scale of living, so that a comparison between the increase of salaries and the increase in the cost of certain goods is no indication at all of the increased difficulty of living.