All hail Robin Hanson for taking on the creativity monster!
Creativity is a contemporary buzzword that, well, you know what I think about creativity. Kudos to associate professor of economics Robin Hanson at George Mason University for giving creativity a good beating in the latest issue Business Week magazine, a publication that revels in glorious stories of how business challenges are overcome by creativity.
Writes Mr Hanson:
To succeed in academia, my graduate students and I had to learn to be less creative than we were initially inclined to be. Critics complain that schools squelch creativity, but most people are inclined to be more creative on the job than would be truly productive. So schooling is mostly about selecting the smarter and more diligent, and learning how to show up day after day to do somewhat boring jobs with ambigious instructions.
What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way.
