This is the story of the buzziest buzzwords of them all: Creativity & Innovation, and our seventy year love affair with these two beautiful ideas. “The Creativity Con” traces all the things we have imagined these words mean, all the things we have done in their name, and how we came to disregard all the ugly consequences of this toxic relationship. Americans have a passion for talking about thinking different and the power of the human imagination, but from the Cold War right down to yesterday’s announcement about AI, these same ideas have also served as the soaring credo of our post-industrial plutocracy. Tax cuts, privatization, deindustrialization, bank deregulation—every one of these decisions was made with the hope that it would somehow help to rekindle American innovativeness, jump-start our national genius for coming up with useful new things. Instead what they did was build a class of pseudo-enlightened white-collar “creatives” whom we were constantly urged to admire and respect—even as actual creative workers went to the wall and blue-collar America watched its way of life come to an end. To trace this glamorous, awful story is to uncover the secret history of neoliberalism itself.