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Robin Hanson's 'Myth of Creativity"
Here is the link. Excerpt:
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 to show up day after day to somewhat boring jobs with ambiguous 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.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 23, 2006 at 02:12 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
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....
Posted by: tylerh at Jun 23, 2006 3:26:39 PM
Sure, there is useful, productive creativity and there is bohemian, feel-good, nonsense. Beyond that, this article is a long-winded rant without any coherent point.
Posted by: Giovanni at Jun 23, 2006 3:29:21 PM
"As is the case with all good things in life -- love, good manners, language, cooking -- personal creativity is required only rarely."
-- Leon Krier
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Jun 23, 2006 3:42:57 PM
Hanson has a good point. There are tons of innovative ideas. The problem is figuring out which will work and, more important, doing the grunt work that makes them successful.
Too many people like to fashion themselves "big thinkers," or "visionaries," or "grand strategists." This is usually an excuse for leaving the work to others. Generating ideas is easy. Making them work is hard. So part of the problem is a notion of creativity that defines it in terms of the former, and overlooks the latter.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Jun 23, 2006 3:43:34 PM
Yep.
Posted by: mickslam at Jun 23, 2006 4:52:36 PM
I do not agree that there are too many visionaries or "grand strategists," although I do agree with Robin that creativity is less important than focusing on and communicating the best ideas.
If you believe there are too many "big thinkers", I submit that you spend a lot of time either in academia or in other centers of the creative elite. In the US as a whole (and in most other countries) , there are still more plodders, bureaucrats, and people afraid of change than there are creative visionaries.
Note that Robin's article is itself a very big-picture, visionary one, so abstract that it is addressing meta-ideas instead of ideas themselves. I have a feeling that Robin is an extremely creative/visionary person, albeit one who has learned to channel his creative energies to productive use.
Posted by: DK at Jun 23, 2006 5:36:51 PM
I agree with the specific points that everyone here is making. People often romanticize the role of conceptual ideas and overlook the hard work and pain involved. As Thomas Edison said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!"
What I was trying to say is that the article is more of an emotional critique against a general sentiment that the author perceives rather than a concrete point about the nature of creativity or innovation.
Posted by: Giovanni at Jun 23, 2006 5:58:45 PM
Seminars teach employees to "think outside the box" and release their inner Picasso.
He misses the easy gimme on this one. 'Creativity' cannot be taught.
Posted by: Varangy at Jun 23, 2006 6:01:28 PM
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
Posted by: Wild Pegasus at Jun 23, 2006 6:32:32 PM
I understand your perspectives, but let me voice a little dissent. I think coming up with creative new ideas is very hard and very rare. My inability to succeed in academia, and to some extent in industry too, was not that I couldn't work hard or make things happen, but that I couldn't come up with something truly creative to study, or truly creative ways to solve longstanding problems. I believe that there are many undiscovered ideas that, once expressed, will instantly be recognized as brilliant and useful, and the implementation will be the easier part. Wouldn't you agree that many paradigm-shifting advances in science were brought about not by hard work but by inspiration - Newton, Einstein, etc.?
Posted by: Pearl Yonick at Jun 23, 2006 6:33:06 PM
"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."
Who defines what is important?
Posted by: Chairman Mao at Jun 23, 2006 6:49:56 PM
DK, most people are afraid of change because change can be expensive. Making change cheaper, not preaching creativity, is the key to winning them over.
Giovanni, OpEds are supposed to be more like emotional rants than are academic papers.
Pearl, an idea where thinking of it is the hard part and selling and implemementing it are the easy parts is pretty much unheard of.
Posted by: Robin Hanson at Jun 23, 2006 9:10:50 PM
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.
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Jun 23, 2006 9:16:13 PM
This really hit home for me. My experience in graduate school has been entirely one of trying to learn competence. Creativity hasn't been a problem for me; it's been mastering the seemingly little things so as to become technically proficient. Really, isn't it like that in everything, though? How many people approach music by over-emphasizing creativity, and ignoring technical expertise?
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Jun 23, 2006 11:27:34 PM
We all know that creativity must often be reined in and applied incrementally to create something substantive from one’s imagination. The truly creative people are creative enough to realize this. What is the concern?
Posted by: Chairman Mao at Jun 24, 2006 12:31:21 AM
Is this guy a teenager going through his "the world is full of hypocrites" phase? Yes, people praise creativity but the real incentives we face favor a lot of drudgery. And people respond to those incentives. For all the commenters here who think this is, like, amazingly insightful, I have some more insights for you:
People praise honestly, but the real incentives they face everyday occasionally favor dishonesty. And people respond to those incentives.
People praise self-sacrifice, but the real incentives they face everyday favor the pursuit of their own self-interest. And people respond to those incentives.
I could go on, but apparently I'm already insightful enough to qualify as somebody's "personal saint".
Posted by: David Wright at Jun 24, 2006 3:12:58 AM
Reminds me of economic historian Joel Mokyr's distinction between micro inventions and macro inventions....
Posted by: eric at Jun 24, 2006 8:51:10 AM
David, my complaint isn't about hypocricy, that people praise creativity but then choose drudgery, but that people too often seek glory by choosing to strive for creativity, when certain kinds of drudgery would be a lot more useful.
Posted by: Robin Hanson at Jun 24, 2006 9:42:01 AM
"Creativity is in."
Is that actually so? My impression has been -- and I am not institutionalized, as are so many people in blogworld, so I might not be au courant with what goes on in the bureaucratic mind -- is that "creativity" was a fad of half a decade ago. And even then it was laughed at as something only totally dull people would even consider trying on, as one tries on a cloak. So the timeliness of this essay startles me as I had thought that no one had taken "creativity" seriously for years.
Posted by: David Sucher at Jun 24, 2006 10:49:25 AM
this guy is a shamelessly self aggrandizing uber-hack. what self respecting (tenured!) academic posts his GRE scores on his university web page?
with regards to the content of the article, i'm with david wright. this is a thin, weakly argued straw man argument identifying a nonexistant "problem," and generates most of its mileage from being generically contrarian. after visiting his professional web page, a many-pages long paean to his own evidently irrepressible creativity (i'm reporting for duty, "chief economist at starfleet command"), it reads like a petulant rant from a 9-year-old who wants to keep his "creativity" toy all to himself.
Posted by: bob at Jun 24, 2006 2:52:01 PM
Hanson: "Creativity is a crok."
Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
I think I'll go with Einstein.
Posted by: George at Jun 24, 2006 3:53:44 PM
Provocative thesis. At b-schools we teach about the dearth of innovation and "exploration," but perhaps you have a point.
Also, I know the Richard Floria-esque argument (that the article cites - bohemians+diversity) certainly has come under question by many (though many cities explicitly are explicitly making plans around his thesis) scholars including Jamie Peck and Terry Nichols Clark - I think I'd go with them...
Posted by: teppo at Jun 24, 2006 8:57:49 PM
DW: +1
People who talk about Einstein: I think that some of his working papers were published, or at least described. He worked on his theories for ~10 years unsuccessfully, hammering and hacking at them until he finally got it.
Wouldn't it be better in some respects if the person who got the idea was really responsible for bringing it into existense/practice/etc., instead of some anonymous "innovation managers" who does not feel for their brainchild? Maybe that way we'd get more problems solved, believe me we've got some.
Posted by: A Tykhyy at Jun 24, 2006 10:32:00 PM
Robin Hanson, wow, thank you for the reply! You're definitely right about op-ed pieces.
Posted by: Giovanni at Jun 25, 2006 12:28:38 AM
“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/
Posted by: Robin Hanson at Jun 25, 2006 9:59:10 AM
Robin,
You may be right that more innovation is needed relative to invention,
the classic distinction in tech change lit. However this looks like
more of your going after Florida again.
So, I ate crow on that one, but there was a hidden kicker in that
empirical quickie by Glaeser. The dependent variable was pop growth
of cities. OK, fine. The regression had schooling driving everything,
except for the goofy bohemian index that somehow rates Las Vegas and
Sarasota as great centers of that (although I have recently heard that
Sarasota sort of might be a bit). You were all into how smelly sex
maniacs do not help urban population growth, but put this all into the
context of innovative nerds in Silicon Valley blah blah.
The kicker in that regression was that patents issued also had a
negative coefficient. Now, is that invention but not innovation?
There should be less being creative and searching for patents?
This somehow seems like bad advice, even if giving tax breaks for
hippie panhandlers is probably not good advice. I suspect that if
the dependent variable in Glaeser's regression had been growth rate
of real per capita income, there would have been some different
results, although schooling probably would still have been the
dominant variable.
Anyway, I think you are overdoing the "everybody get boring and
keep your noses to the grindstone, except for the occasional innovater
and the even rarer inventor" line.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jun 26, 2006 3:49:50 PM
Barkley, I am not sure if we have too many patents or too few - theory is ambiguous. I presume that some patent pursuit has positive externalities, but other patent pursuit, such as with many software patents, seems to have negative externalities.
Posted by: Robin Hanson at Jun 27, 2006 8:14:32 AM
Robin,
I couldn't access the link (it seems that GMU's servers are down), but from reading the excerpted portion here, it seems like your argument is that an overemphasis on creativity leads to the loss of productive activity/stifles innovation because insufficient energy is spent on implementation.
However, that seems a little short-sighted, because it ignores the fact that creativity may have a product-independent value. This is the telling quote:
"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 to show up day after day to somewhat boring jobs with ambiguous instructions."
If creativity creates independent utility (it makes people happier to work at jobs where they can be creative than it does to live a life of drudgery counting the days until death), then might not that utility outweigh the lost utility from lowered productivity? In other words, and in perhaps an unduly inflamatory quote for an econ blog, does focus on productivity rather than self-actualization stand in the way of "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all?"
Posted by: Paul Gowder at Jun 27, 2006 1:31:11 PM
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.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jun 27, 2006 2:07:26 PM
Paul and Barkley, my main argument is that because creativity (of a certain sort) is given high status, there is an inefficient signaling equilibrium where people try too hard to display it, and we have too much of it.
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