The Creativity Con

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

Innovation and creativity have been the watchwords of progress for decades, used by business thinkers, tech gurus, military strategists, educators, and urban planners to describe the virtues that set prosperous modern societies apart from all others. Countries that honour creative people are dynamic and productive, our authorities tell us, while those that don't are condemned to mediocrity and stagnation. In his new book, Thomas Frank blasts these received ideas apart, offering a bold account of the way that creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that reinforce our new 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, our leaders have reoriented our societies around white-collar knowledge work, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated banks, off-shored manufacturing, reoriented cities, and destroyed what is truly creative about human achievement.

Deeply original, marked by Frank's signature brilliance and acerbic wit, The Creativity Con is a troubling X-ray of postwar business and political cultures - and a crushing indictment of the cliches that have undergirded our many failures.

Cultural and political analyst Frank excoriates the disastrous results of the American love affair with "innovation." ... A pithy and entertaining writer, Frank has a special talent for the trenchant quip ... A spirited indictment of the American obsession with innovation.
-Kirkus Reviews

This biting analysis from bestseller and Baffler cofounder Thomas Frank exposes how America's decades-long fixation on creativity and innovation helped construct an unequal postindustrial society ... Frank's wry critique exposes how creativity and innovation are "a marker of ghastliness," wielded as a justification for policy that benefits only the so-called enlightened few. It's a sharp look at how prized American values mask inequality.
-Publishers Weekly

Praise for People Without Power:
Brilliantly written, eye-opening ... From 1891 to the rise of Trumpism, Frank walks readers through a minefield of assumptions about populism's nature and history ... Throughout People Without Power, Frank takes pains to look at populism through a broad lens ... His reflection on how the jeans-clad Jimmy Carter wrapped himself in populism to avoid being tagged as a socialist, liberal or conservative is spot-on.
-Douglas Brinkley, The Washington Post