“If the individual’s wants are to be urgent, they must be original with himself. They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived for him. And above all they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied ...
For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground. One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.” (J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society.)
In his review of Galbraith’s book, Friedrich Hayek (jstor.org/stable/1055533…) criticises this account of the ‘dependence effect’ (as Galbraith termed it). Hayek acknowledges that most of people’s desires are ‘contrived’ in the sense of being the result of social processes of ...
emulation, etc. But Hayek denies that such preferences must therefore be unimportant. Taking music and literature as examples, he argues that it is only because such goods are produced that there is any demand for them. Yet far from being of little worth, they are some ...
of humankind’s most valued achievements: “If the fact that people would not feel the need for something if it were not produced did prove that such products are of small value,” Hayek contends, “all those highest products of human endeavour would be of small value.”
For Hayek, this shows that Galbraith is too quick to jump to the conclusion preferences created through the dependence effect must be of distinctly limited worth. For a useful discussion of the arguments, see tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… 
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