Thomas Frank on 'The Creativity Con' and America's Innovation Myth

Author Thomas Frank tells Bloomberg This Weekend that America's celebration of creativity and innovation has helped justify policies that elevated white-collar knowledge work while contributing to inequality and the decline of manufacturing. Speaking with hosts David Gura and Christina Ruffini about his new book, The Creativity Con, Frank challenges the assumption that innovation is a uniquely American trait or a reliable guarantee of broadly shared prosperity. The conversation interrogates how the language of creativity has been used in policy debates, and how the prestige attached to knowledge work has shaped labor markets, regional economies and the standing of manufacturing jobs. Frank argues that the story Americans tell about their own inventiveness can obscure the distributional consequences of the choices built on that story. By tying cultural narratives to economic outcomes, the segment offers viewers a provocative counterpoint to conventional wisdom about innovation, competitiveness and who actually benefits when a country organizes its economy around the idea of creativity.