December 5, 2025
Mad Men, Sad People
Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction (2019) [pdf]
More ads, less joy: readers call for 'vice taxes' and blame ads for climate chaos
TLDR: A study of one million Europeans says more national ad spending tracks with lower life satisfaction. Commenters want 'vice' taxes on ads, blame them for climate damage, and crack jokes, turning a data point into a policy fight over how marketing shapes happiness and society.
A heavyweight study of about 1 million Europeans across 27 countries over 30 years says national ad spending goes up, life satisfaction goes down. Cue the comments section going full Mad Men vs. Sad Men. One camp wants ads treated like sins: tax them like booze and cigarettes, cut the noise, and maybe force better quality. Another camp says the paper underplays the damage—advertising doesn’t just make us feel worse, it pushes overconsumption and “destroys the climate.” A third voice shrugs with dark humor: “I maintain a healthy depression without ads,” aka ads aren’t the only problem, folks.
Cultural references flew fast: multiple users pointed to Adam Curtis’s The Century of Self, the viral doc on how Freud’s nephew helped design modern manipulation. The data nerds dropped the famous Easterlin paradox (more money doesn’t mean more happiness) and name-checked old-school economist Thorstein Veblen’s “keeping up with the Joneses” vibes. Meanwhile, a practical skeptic asked, “Does anyone tax ad spend?”—which turned the thread into a policy brawl with no easy answers.
The mood: exasperated, energized, and a bit fatalistic. Between calls for ad taxes, climate alarms, and gallows humor, the community is united on one thing: relentless marketing makes us want more—and feel worse—by design.
Key Points
- •Using data on ~1 million citizens in 27 European nations over three decades, the study finds increases in national advertising expenditure are followed by declines in life satisfaction.
- •Results are robust to controls for personal and economic characteristics, country fixed effects, year dummies, and business-cycle influences.
- •The paper situates its findings within theories of relative preferences and conspicuous consumption (Easterlin Paradox; Veblen).
- •Contextual evidence shows pervasive advertising exposure and growth, including frequent brand appearances on U.S. prime-time TV and a fourfold rise in per-capita ad spend over five decades.
- •Authors note further research is desirable, but their evidence is consistent with advertising potentially depressing societal well-being by fostering unending desires.