BenjaminK@mastodon.nu

2 days ago

All these momentous efforts, undertaken over the decades to revive innovation and creativity . . . and yet the twin gods have never really returned. Writing and music and liberal-arts academia are career dead ends today, as everyone knows. Culturally speaking, the country is obviously stagnant, with its classic rock and its superhero movies. Politically, we are in an endless loop of the old identity politics versus backlash wars of the 1970s. We still drive cars and live in suburbs and travel on jet planes and blast our enemies with B-52s. And despite our tax cutting and our deregulating and even despite our very real advances in computers and telecommunications, productivity growth today lags well behind the pace of the ’50s and ’60s. Even in the unhappy year 1978, the economy grew at a rate of 5.5 percent, much greater than what we ordinarily achieve nowadays.
"We modern Americans have succeeded in discovering levels of inequality unknown to our ancestors."
But we modern Americans have succeeded in discovering levels of inequality unknown to our ancestors. Today what economists call the “labor share” of national income is at all-time lows, as blue-collar workers are tossed overboard from the middle class. What we might call the “creative share,” meanwhile, is at all-time highs. In 1978, there were only two known billionaires in the United States. Today there are close to a thousand, cornering this market or that one, jacking up the price of medicine, injecting millions into political campaigns, collecting art, dispensing wisdom to the eager crowds at SXSW, building their end-times fortresses, chirping about how AI might end humanity, achieving remarkable levels of spiritual enlightenment, and absorbing the praise of the world for their innovativeness, their amazing powers of creativity.
Sometimes it feels as though the old middle-class society was undone by its dreams. “Equality is the antithesis of creativity,” an education magazine instructed Americans back in 1960. But we never understood the contradiction or considered the oligarchic downside. We loved equality and yet valued creativity over almost everything else: this is what we wanted for every child, the vague but all-American form of brilliance that would give us artistic achievement and spiritual satisfaction at the same time. It was a short walk from there to the cultlike adulation we routinely express for Steve Jobs, innovator and prophet, billionaire son of the old middle class.

The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America’s Biggest Racket by Thomas Frank (Penguin Press, 2026)

Taken from https://jacobin.com/2026/10/frank-creativity-class-inequality-neoliberalism

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