Just as it was asked to, the nation shopped till it dropped. And how it has dropped, into a double-dip recession the like of which has not been seen for 50 years. Now, economists argue that demand must be stimulated. People need to feel confident about buying stuff again. Banks need to feel confident about lending them the money to do so. Cameron may bluster about how the coalition has to pick up the pieces after an unsustainable boom. But he seems utterly unable to understand what a paradoxical message he is delivering. He wants people to relax and start spending. But he also insists that it was relaxing and spending that got the economy into this mess. Meanwhile, no one seems willing to state the obvious: that it's consumer society itself that is unsustainable, not just ecologically but economically.

Now, I like stuff as much as the next woman. I have a lot of stuff. And I don't mind paying people for the effort they have expended in creating that stuff. But what I find extraordinary is that those people – the producers – have been for a long time now considered much less important than the consumers. And the consumers are not kings, either. The kings are the people who create want, by imbuing objects with desirability, not the people who make the objects.

Elizabeth Taylor apparently made more money from flogging "her" perfume, White Diamonds, than she did from all of her acting work put together. Again, I like perfume. But I know that the money I spend on fragrant liquid isn't really buying me fragrant liquid. That's just a small part of what I'm buying. Mainly, I'm buying something I don't want (or like to think I don't want) – a complicated cocktail of marketing myth-making called branding. Strip branding away from all sorts of products, and they are (supposedly) virtually worthless: the raw materials and the primary labour can be bought at a fraction of the price of the assembled desirable thing. An empty perfume bottle is junk, no matter how pretty it is. The extravagant packet it came in was junk from the minute the bottle was sprung from it. But, oh, how much nicer, how more lucrative it is to design packaging for a living, or sign up celebrities to sponsor things, or work in the media, rather than in manufacturing.

The people who work in "creative industries" are those who "create" demand. We all need food, clothes, shelter, fuel, technology, transport. The demand is there, always, and there's no great need to "stimulate it". Yet people who do the basics – grow, prepare and serve food, harvest cotton or run up clothes, build houses, go down mines, assemble iPods or drive trains – are often the ones who are least able to buy stuff, once all the expensive extras have been magicked up by the consultants, the designers and advertising gurus.

The idea of globalisation was that all that basic work could be done in other countries, while in Britain everyone concentrated on providing the marketing expertise. But what has that really resulted in? Huge demand for welfare, as people without these skills in modern alchemy get locked out of the jobs market; a middle class that feels insecure and debt-ridden, now that housing has stopped being a golden goose, and an untouchable super-rich so detached from reality that they don't even understand why they are resented.

Our leaders around the world are fond of declaring that strong economies are all about confidence. At the start of the crash, both George Bush and Gordon Brown made their own statements about the insubstantiality of economic success and failure, as if this was something marvellous, not something ludicrous. Yet while it's a truism that markets are about confidence, much less attention is paid to what exactly it is that bull markets are confident about, and bear markets are wary of.

Money is a means of reward. The people who make and control demand reward themselves at the times when labour and production can be bought most cheaply. Then, when they've wrung every penny out of their victims, their "confidence" collapses. They withdraw, and let the real economy, governed by real needs, recover enough for them to move in again to manipulate and speculate. It's easy to see why they are so fond of their system. It's also easy to see why they get away with it.

Money is a system of punishment, too. Take the feckless poor, spending all their money on flat-screen tellies and booze. Great! Give them loads more money! Let them flood Currys! Let them flood Oddbins with demand for nice wine that doesn't give you a hangover! These guys can't hang on to their money. Give them lots, because in five minutes it'll be back in the hands of the hardworking denizens of the retail and manufacturing industries. Hurrah!

Somehow, however, it doesn't work that way. Liz Taylor's name can flog perfume, so that's worth rewarding. But the people who buy perfume just because it's got Taylor's name on it – they're fools, who deserve to be parted from their money. They are worthless – they don't even have a good name. They probably call their children things like White Diamonds. Exploiters are admirable and clever. The exploited are contemptible and stupid. How can it be admirable and clever to exploit such vulnerable scraps of humanity?

Our society's values are skewed. The wrong things are considered important. Every decent person hates filth and squalor, for example. Living in such conditions is considered as a moral failure at best, a mental illness at worst. Yet the people who clean up our dirty, filthy world are the lowest of the low, especially when it comes to pay and conditions. Those who create the demand that is really just a compulsion to own and consume are rewarded. Those who merely meet the demand that is always there are punished.

Sure, "things" are important. Functionality is important. Beauty is important. Innovation is important. But the need to "stimulate demand" means that it's also "important" to discard things, throw them away, get new ones. That's the growth that politicians wish for a return to, even as they berate people for doing it in the first place.

Raw materials and basic services need to be valued more, manufacturing skill needs to be valued more and, oddly, "things" need to be valued more. In a real economy that conserves, mends and cleans things, that buys expensive items because they have real value and will last, not because there's a phenomenal marketing campaign behind them, there are satisfying and respected jobs. But it will take a huge philosophical shift to make it happen.

The CEO of the beleaguered Lloyds Banking Group, Antonio Horta-Osorio, admitted this week that British banking was in a "deep crisis" of confidence and trust. Frankly, when these guys start feeling on top of the world again, it'll be bad news. It will mean that the merry-go-round has been cranked up again, and that another opportunity for positive change has been squandered.