Lean Logic is an eye opening book. Here is a section on needs and wants from it's author David Fleming.
The notion that needs are good and wants bad does not survive inspection. For the anthropologists Douglas and Isherwood, it is a “curious moral split [that] appears under the surface of most economists’ thoughts on human needs”. Indeed, Lean Logic argues that those economists may have it somewhat back-to-front.N81
The heaviest burden of the modern economy, by far, is that imposed by its own elaborations—the massive infrastructures and material flows of the intermediate economy—which are needed because of the special problems of sustaining a system of such a size. Regardless of whether we want them, we now need the sewage systems, heavy-goods transport, police forces, hospitals. Given the substantial scale of the task of feeding, raising and schooling a suburban family, and the increasing challenge of such routine needs as finding a post office, many of us undoubtedly need cars. The collapse of local self-reliance was both the cause and the effect of the massive elaboration of transport, and when that need is no longer met, its life-sustaining function will be bitterly recognised.
It is, then, the multiplication of needs by large-scale industrial life that causes the trouble. Our wants are squeezed out, much missed and—if freed of much of the intermediate economy on which at present they depend—light by comparison, not least because they often involve labour-intensive crafts and services: pianists, craftsmen, dressmakers, waitresses, gardeners with minimum environmental impact. Some wants are also needs, of course, and they cannot be cleanly separated, but if we focus our efforts on finding ways, under the stresses of the climacteric, of achieving a substantial and rapid liquidation of our needs, we will be getting somewhere.