Robin Hanson’s ‘Myth of Creativity”

I hereby annoint Robin Hanson my personal saint. For years I have horrified my friends by forcefully arguing, “Creativity is over-rated.” Most great innovations invovled enourmous amounts of “tinkering”, that is small changes aimed at solving immediate problems, before having any effect. But rarely have I convinced — we over-educated types do love to worship our Gods of Genius.

But now, I have a patron saint….

Yep.

Creativity is under-valued because corporate hierarchy and mass markets are heavily subsidized by the State, not to mention that the State itself is a soulless behemoth.

Interestingly enough, he’s right that the public schools squelch creativity and personal self-development. Why is that? The founders of the public school movement made it clear why: the hope was to create a race of worker drones, shorn of independent thought, easily controlled by state propoganda, and unable or unwilling to labour outside the corporate structure.

Maybe the schools areally are working.

- Josh

This is a good essay by Robin Hanson. The last paragraph is the key to his
argument:

“In truth, we don’t need more suggestion boxes or more street mimes to fill
people with a spirit of creativity. We instead need to better manage the
flood of ideas we already have and to reward managers for actually
executing them.”

The distinction between creativity and innovation is that the latter
implies the execution of a plan, whereas the former does not.

The BW issue’s cover story highlights the evil Nathan Myhrvold, calling him
“the Godfather of Invention.” Godfather alright, but master of state-granted
patent monopolies is more like it.

Reminds me of economic historian Joel Mokyr’s distinction between micro inventions and macro inventions….

Hanson: “Creativity is a crok.”

Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

I think I’ll go with Einstein.

“Creativity and innovation are the two great things that all corporations make such a song and dance about†¦,† Kellaway says. “They all talk in such a ghastly way, which is often a substitute for thinking. And when they come up with an idea that they genuinely think is creative, it’s laughable.†

So says the author of “Who Moved My Blackberry†, hat tip to Romana and http://www.snarkhunting.com/2006/06/creovate-or-die/

Robin,

I would agree that some patents are simply efforts to impose monopoly power on
something for which it is not appropriate.

OTOH, population growth of cities is determined by a variety of irrelevant things
like the condition of state laws on urban annexation.

At the broader level, most observers would argue that the key advantage of the US
economy in the longer run is our advantage in technological change. Perhaps we need
more people who are good at something besides inventing, and maybe even besides innovating,
this picking the good innovations out of the mass of them or whatever. Are these the
entrepreneurs? Are you simply calling for more or better entrepreneurs? It seems like
you want workers who are smart and educated but do what they are told, or something like
that, without whining about how creative they are or want to be. This seems like a
recommendation that easily become a dead end.