The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America's Biggest Racket - Hardcover

Frank, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593657535 ISBN 13: 9780593657539

Publisher: Penguin Press, 2026

Synopsis

A bold indictment of America’s chronic obsession with creativity and innovation, tracing how these beloved ideas came to dominate our political and economic conversation while serving to mask inequality and protect elite interests

“Innovation” and “creativity” have been the defining watchwords of American exceptionalism for decades. They’re deployed by business leaders, tech gurus, military strategists, educators, and urban planners to describe our 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 The Creativity Con, Thomas Frank disabuses us of this notion, offering a provocative account of the way creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that reinforce the class system.

Frank charts the construction of America’s glamorous self-image from Sputnik to Silicon Valley, Apple to Lockheed Martin, Madison Avenue to Main Street, Richard Florida to Donald Trump. He deconstructs the innovation agendas touted by politicians; reads pop psychology; tours SXSW, the mecca of creativity, where musicians mingle with Pentagon officials; and looks in on the cafés, sidewalk murals, and bike lanes that populate the neighborhoods built for the creative class. Along the way, Frank uncovers the insidious effects of centering innovation and creativity in our rhetoric while, in practice, nurturing exactly the opposite. He shows how, in the name of these noble goals, our leaders have reoriented the American economy around white-collar knowledge work, cut taxes for the wealthy, deregulated banks, offshored 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 postwar American business and political culture—and a crushing indictment of the clichés that have undergirded its many failures.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Frank is the bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?; Listen, Liberal; The People, No; and other books. Frank is a founding editor of The Baffler and a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and has written regularly for Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He lives outside Washington, DC.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.

Progress Is Our Most Important Product

In the beginning was the deed. Before the word "creativity" became the beloved cliché of TED Talks and management conferences, Americans were building and making and creating: filing for patents; inventing devices and machines (the light bulb, the telephone, the airplane); constructing vast systems for assembling and transporting things; designing complex organizations for building cars, distributing electricity, and packaging food.

Producing was what America was all about once upon a time-or so lots of people believed. We were the country that built, that made, that created-the world's "preeminent technological nation," to borrow a phrase from Thomas P. Hughes, a historian of industrial progress. We were the land of inventors and engineers, of skyscrapers and speed, of River Rouge and the TVA.

That old America's zenith came during World War II. The US made and built in quantities so great that the efforts of Japan and Germany-serious industrial powers in their own right-were crushed by US output. At one point in 1944, a giant aircraft factory in Michigan was putting out one B-24 bomber nearly every hour. On the West Coast, the Kaiser shipyards could assemble a Liberty ship in four days. According to the economist Robert J. Gordon, American GDP nearly doubled between 1939 and 1944. American productivity, he notes, increased at a rate never seen before or since in the modern era. Blue-collar workers were the heroes of the hour, men and women both, working three shifts a day to defeat the Axis.

It was a different sort of creativity that transfixed the world on August 6, 1945, with a flash and a cloud and some seventy thousand lives instantly snuffed out. The people who made it happen were scientists, theoretical physicists mainly, and they won the greatest arms race of all time by building the world's first atomic bomb.

It is this second story, this modern-day fable of scientific achievement and incalculable destruction, that hangs over everything I describe in the pages to come. The power to eradicate human life on such a stupendous scale was hardly a benevolent innovation, but in a perverse way, it was the ultimate demonstration of the godlike power of original thought. The success of the Manhattan Project established the technological genius as the paramount figure of the age. It planted the idea that a new social order had arrived, that creative brilliance was henceforth the quality that really mattered. In its aftermath, as the psychologist Frank Barron has written, governments clamored to understand creativity "because the sheer physical power and, by a very short step, political power that comes from inventiveness had suddenly become so manifest."

...

Creativity theory has always been a way of telling these two stories, these intertwining national epics of invention and production. This is not to say that creativity theory tells the stories factually or precisely or objectively, of course. Much of what we know about creativity and innovation is mythical: admiring tales about the amazing powers of superhuman producers. Some of it is psychological: speculation about the type of mind that generates productive triumphs. Some is economic. The phrase "creative destruction," for example, coined in 1942 by Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter, was meant to describe entrepreneurship, the basic activity of American capitalism.

In its early iterations, creativity was not a democratic or lovable doctrine. Consider Ayn Rand's take on the idea in her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, a tale of a modernist architect loosely based on the career of Frank Lloyd Wright. Rand's object seems to have been to translate the old European cult of genius into the vernacular of modern American business by using the keyword "creator." Her architect hero, Howard Roark, is a man of brilliance and originality, a classic individualist surrounded on all sides by quivering, second-rate losers who conspire cruelly against him. Again and again, Roark refuses to compromise with the corrupt universe, even dynamiting one of his own buildings when he discovers that the design has been altered. This is how Rand tells us that he has integrity.

When Roark is made to stand trial for the dynamite incident, he justifies his actions by informing the jury about "the great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors" who have confronted a hostile world since time immemorial. And yet for all the world's hate, Roark insists, it is the producer's "creative faculty" that is "the moving force" behind civilization, giving us all our great inventions. In turn, the force behind the mastermind's creativity is a sort of drive for self-expression that Roark calls "the Prime Mover," which is how Rand tells us that creative people are gods.

Creativity, then, is a sort of high-performing individualism that the world is required to respect. Ordinary people do not participate in creativity; in fact, they are suspicious of it, and yet it is what allows them to live in an advanced technological society.

We see something similar in the works of British historian Arnold Toynbee, a much-celebrated intellectual in the '40s, thanks to a massive treatise he wrote purporting to explain all of human civilization. In Toynbee's theory of everything, which was taken seriously enough in those days to land him on the cover of Time magazine, the great cycle of history begins with a "creative minority," the bearers of what he called "the divine spark of creative power." It is these "creative" figures, these "geniuses, mystics or supermen," who are ultimately responsible for all progress. "The lump of ordinary humanity," meanwhile, consists of mass creatures who might have a "veneer of education" but have advanced only slightly over "primitive mankind."

There is a lot to dislike in these early creativity theories. According to Rand and Toynbee, creativity was a flatly elitist doctrine, a philosophy of indifference or contempt toward ordinary people, who were to be either dominated or directed by their godlike betters. If you ask me, this is still what creativity theory is about, with its gifted children and its "creative class" and its Silicon Valley geniuses demanding that governments cede them personal autonomous zones in which they can make and build as they see fit. Elitism is the unbending core of the philosophy.

Elitism, however, was hardly a faith to inspire the millions or persuade emerging nations to take our side in the struggle against communism. A new world of mass democracy was rising from the ashes of fascism and imperialism, and human excellence would have to be reconceived in an entirely new way.

...

Our current understanding of creativity appeared on the scene around the year 1950. This is when the first popular books on the subject were published, when academic psychology took an interest in the matter, and when this mental ability called "creativity" suddenly began to seem to Americans like the quality that made our civilization attractive and universal. It took a different sort of person, not a Rand or Toynbee, to assemble the optimistic, inclusive, democratic doctrine that we know today-someone who understood America's intense egalitarianism as well as its national myths of inventiveness and technology, a person who knew how to sell an idea to the public. In other words, it required an adman.

Alex F. Osborn was the name of the heroic salesman in question. He was one of the founders of the famous New York advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, better known as BBDO. When I say that Osborn is the original fount and source of the creativity talk that is spoken so enthusiastically today by presidents and pharma execs, I mean it right down to the last detail of the idea. The twin notions that all people carry the spark of creativity and that creativity, unlike intelligence, can be taught, learned, sharpened, and (as Osborn put it) "stepped up by effort"-these two attractive ideas can be traced to a series of popular books that Osborn wrote and published in the late '40s and early '50s. Every time some contemporary creativity guru ushers us into his Innovatrium or exhorts us to remember that everyone has the potential to come up with a great idea, they are paying unconscious homage to this Promethean adman of the last century.

Creativity writers often ignore Osborn or downplay his contributions. It is slightly embarrassing, I suppose, to recall that this pedagogy has its roots in flimflam. But the facts must be faced. Osborn's imprint on the project is indelible. He launched the genre, and creativity theory remains, to a very large degree, exactly as Osborn fashioned it way back when: part science, part self-help, part politics, and a huge helping of bullshit.

Who was Alex Osborn? As admen go, he was one of the greats, one of the figures who made Madison Avenue. A dapper, round-faced man with an improbable resemblance to Harry S. Truman, Osborn and his lifelong friend Bruce Barton launched BBDO in 1919. The agency was an immediate success: In the 1920s, BBDO became the most celebrated promoter of the most promotion-celebrating decade in history, mainly thanks to Barton, who emerged as a sort of superstar of ballyhoo. The campaigns that Barton and Osborn devised for DuPont, General Motors, and General Electric were masterpieces, each of them selling products by praising the wonders of progress itself.

By the late 1940s, Osborn was a senior statesman of Madison Avenue, ready to share the wisdom he had accumulated over decades in the boardrooms of corporate America. Through a series of popular books-Your Creative Power in 1948, Wake Up Your Mind in 1952, and Applied Imagination in 1953-he invited us to marvel at the inventiveness that powered our business civilization.

Osborn's writing on creativity is almost entirely anecdotal, made up of story after story in which great men say pithy things and make their big breakthroughs. The adman told America how Thomas Edison worked to overcome his timidity, how a scientist at DuPont invented nylon, how Walter P. Chrysler came up with his improvements on the automobile. Osborn reminded us how Alexander Graham Bell resolved to study electricity. He repeated Charles F. Kettering's inspiring words on perseverance. He rattled off the many uses for Scotch tape. The great ideas people came up with on trains. How Osborn himself once convinced Calvin Coolidge to hire somebody. Where did all of these amazing successes come from? The answer, of course, was always "creativity," and Osborn would reveal how business leaders did it, how famous authors did it, and how you could do it too.

Osborn eventually became a full-time evangelist for the concept, selling creativity the way he'd once sold cars for GM. And the campaign was a smash hit. The adman was profiled in major magazines, his books reprinted in cheap paperback editions, his how-to pamphlets distributed in enormous numbers. Giant corporations taught Osborn's methods to employees, and ROTC instructors taught them to future military officers. Osborn himself appeared at countless business conferences to share the secrets of the human imagination with the assembled executives.

...

The ingredient that distinguished Osborn's sunny theory of creativity from Rand's toxic one was a democratic faith that everyone was creative. This was the adman's signature rhetorical trick, the idea that allowed creativity theory to capture the minds of the millions. "Imagination is as universal as memory," Osborn declared. Young people could be creative and old people too. Both sexes were on equal footing, and there was no need for high IQs or fancy diplomas. Anyone could do creativity. And on that simple, attractive conviction was built a vast empire of bestselling books, lecture-circuit stardom, witty Time-Life think pieces, and checkout-line self-help pamphlets.

Osborn made all the obvious acknowledgments, of course. There were differences in creative ability, he allowed, with some people coming to it more naturally than others. Still, Osborn persisted in his vision of the democracy of creativity: the belief that everyone carries the vital spark within them and that, with practice, everyone can learn to come up with new ideas. Osborn reiterated this claim constantly over the course of his career, but for now let us choose one evocative iteration of it, from a 1949 Reader's Digest profile: "For 40 years I have been cracked on the idea that all of us can learn how to think our way out of the booby traps of life. . . . Imagination can be developed like a muscle and you can learn how to get ideas just as you learn how to swim."

What this meant was that the only thing standing between us and creative success was "effort." Brilliant people could toss out new ideas without much exertion, while others had to sweat to do it-that was the difference. "Who can think up ideas?" Osborn asked in a booklet published in 1942. "You and every other normally intelligent person. But you have to try." It's an understanding of mental ability that parallels America's national promise: Anyone can make it if they learn the ropes and try hard enough.

Okay, so how do we do it? What kind of effort do we have to make to switch on our dormant powers of creativity?

Acting as what he called a "creative coach," Osborn generated all manner of tips for ordinary people who wanted to think more imaginatively in their everyday lives. "101 Ways to Develop Creativeness," shouted the subtitle of his 1952 book, Wake Up Your Mind. Spend time around children, Osborn advised. Read lots of quality books. Do puzzles. Study the advertisements (they are really very clever!). Take up some new hobby or handicraft.

But what anchored Osborn's authority as an expert on creativity was the technique known as "brainstorming," in which a group of people gathered in a room to exchange ideas on a given subject. Legend has it that Osborn invented brainstorming at BBDO in the late 1930s; the agency proceeded to promote the method as its patented in-house approach; before long, everyone on Madison Avenue was doing it.

In his books, articles, and lectures, Osborn described over and over how brainstorming works: You get a group of people together and tell them what to ponder. You suspend judgment and inhibitions-"criticism is ruled out." You adopt a "positive attitude." You dismiss "conventionalism," conformity, norms, and prior assumptions. Total freedom is key as you generate ideas. Wildness reigns. Complete "open-mindedness" is the order of the day.

In this friendly, hospitable, nonjudgmental atmosphere, your brainstormers churn out as many ideas as they can, just throwing them out there as fast as possible. "Quantity, quantity and more quantity!" the great adman urged the world.

Osborn had lots of suggestions for how to come up with ideas during a brainstorming session. Think of historical precedents, he advised. Add things to someone's idea. Subtract things from it. Reverse the order of whatever it is you're pondering. Combine two ideas.

And there you are, sitting around the office with your colleagues, spitting out suggestions one after another, wild words, crazy thoughts, everything permitted, nothing criticized. You
find yourself really getting into it. And-voilà!-you are "brainstorming."

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593657535
• ISBN 13: 9780593657539
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384