Town Hall Presents

“Innovation” and “creativity” have been the defining watchwords of American exceptionalism for decades. They’re deployed by business leaders, techies, 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, and Madison Avenue to Main Street. He deconstructs the innovation agendas touted by politicians, reads pop psychology, tours SXSW, and looks in on the cafés 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.

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