The Creativity Con

From the bestselling and always-prescient author of Listen, Liberal comes a bold indictment of America’s chronic obsession with creativity and innovation, showing how these beloved ideas came to dominate the country’s political and economic conversation, all while serving to mask inequality and protect elite interests.

Innovation and creativity have been the defining watchwords of American exceptionalism for decades, used by business thinkers, tech gurus, military strategists, educators, and urban planners to describe the country’s unique standing in the world. While other countries supposedly suffer from regimentation and a fatal lack of imagination, the United States is often portrayed as an unmatched dynamo of new ideas and products. In his new book, Thomas Frank disabuses us of this notion, offering a bold account of the way creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that reinforce the class system.

Frank uncovers the insidious effects of centring innovation and creativity in rhetoric while, in practice, nurturing exactly the opposite. In the name of these noble goals, he shows, the country’s leaders have reoriented the American economy around white-collar knowledge work, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated banks, off-shored manufacturing, reoriented cities, and destroyed what is truly creative about this country.

Deeply original, marked by Frank’s signature brilliance and acerbic wit, The Creativity Con is a troubling X-ray of post-war American business and political culture — and a crushing indictment of the clichés that have undergirded its many failures.

About the Author

Thomas Frank is the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?; Listen, Liberal; The People, No; and other books. A former columnist for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Frank is a founding editor of The Baffler, and writes regularly for Harper’s and The Guardian. He lives outside Washington, DC.