Progressland: The Creativity Con and the Beautiful Tomorrow That Never Arrived

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.

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.