Creativity beguiles us because it dangles before us a beautiful synergy. “The Lamp That Lit the World Can Light Your Life,” declared the first chapter of one of the first big creativity self-help books (published in 1948), and what it meant was that the mental faculty that gave the world its thrilling art and music . . . the mental faculty that made America productive and prosperous above all nations . . . this same mental faculty would also make your humble, everyday life more vivid, more remunerative, more spiritually satisfying, even. Creativity would make you a better worker and a better person at the same time.

It was an irresistibly appealing idea. Unlike high-IQ brainpower, which is not accessible to most of us, creativity was supposed to be an almost universal faculty, a thing that everyone could access if they tried hard enough and read the right self-help book. Creativity is thus a democratic vision of human inequality, if such a thing is possible — “democratic yet elitist,” as the historian Samuel Franklin put it in his brilliant 2023 book, The Cult of Creativity. With a little work and a little guidance from experts on the imagination, it was said, we could all claim a personal chunk of the ineffable power wielded by Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso: a life of prosperity and joy as we studied the great business tycoons and learned to think like artists.

Of course, some people always turned out to be more creative than others. Everyone had some helping of the newly discovered ability, yes, but the literature focused almost entirely on the creative potential found in the highly educated people at society’s upper reaches: executives, not line workers; military officers, not enlisted personnel; professionals, not the people who followed their prescriptions. Creativity was about human excellence, about individuals who succeeded — this is who we were to mimic, and this is who we were to become.

Creativity eventually became a project for government as well as for individuals, the central idea in a sweeping social vision that is espoused today by educators, tycoons, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and presidents. What sparked the idea’s leap was the launch of Sputnik in 1957, a Soviet triumph that deeply shocked an America that had taken its technological superiority as a matter of faith. Instead of hunting for traitors in physics labs and the State Department, as we had done earlier in the Cold War, the country chose to look inward this time. What Sputnik revealed, commentators concluded, was a national failure of the imagination. A chorus of Jeremiahs scolded us for having grown conformist and apathetic, beguiled by suburban homes and tail-finned cars. Thanks to our long, relaxing bath in the “easy artificiality” of affluence, warned the president of Yale University in 1958, “the fine edge of our faith has been dulled, our creative powers atrophied.” What we required, wrote two-time Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, were “innovators, not organization men.” We needed “Creativity for Survival,” as a 1958 magazine headline put it. We had to celebrate nonconformity if America was to prevail.

The Sputnik-induced panic over insufficient creativity eventually morphed into one of those grand theories of Progress and the American Character of which our ancestors were so fond. Creativity, the experts declared, was a sort of precious raw material desperately required by complex technological societies like ours. Change was accelerating, blue-collar workers were in decline, and creativity at the top was the thing that would keep our corporations from becoming sterile and stagnant in capitalism’s ceaseless gale. Before too many years had passed, this theory had a name: the “postindustrial society.” America was now said to be a country in which “innovation,” creativity’s twin sibling and our national superpower, drove a kind of economic growth that would soon propel us far beyond the rest of the world.

Middle-class culture was saturated with creativity thought in those days. Education commentators pleaded for creative kids who didn’t fit in. Advertising executives began a “creative revolution,” selling cars and soda pops to help us smash the bonds of convention. Creativity was prized by student protesters of the era and also by the university presidents whose offices they occupied. Psychedelic drugs were said to be devices for instant creative enlightenment, and the young people who took them were reported to be exploring ultracreative forms of liberated consciousness.

It was an Age of Aquarius for middle-class Americans in their dawning postindustrial society. It was a world of enchantment and magic; of sprawling universities and national research labs; of nuclear power and supercomputers — each of them a testament to the great but unknowable life force of creativity. War and protest are what we remember the ’60s for today, but at the time it seemed like the beginning of a golden age, with moonshots and soaring modernist architecture and science enthroned in its majesty. At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, we rode the Carousel of Progress and marveled at the gifts given to society by the educated and the enlightened — and given by America to the world.

And then, it all seemed to go wrong. Military failure in Vietnam, gross corruption in Washington, the oil shock and the energy crisis, epidemic drug use, an economic recession concurrent with inflation — these were crushing blows to Americans’ understanding of themselves.

On top of it all was the growing sense that the progress machine had run out of gas. Here is the first sentence of a Washington Post story from November 1978: “It is hardly a matter of doubt anymore: America’s ability to innovate just isn’t what it used to be.” And here is the headline of a different Post essay on the same subject: “Something’s Happened to Yankee Ingenuity.”

The alarm was not misplaced. US economic growth had slowed. A trade deficit had opened up; manufacturing was struggling; the Detroit automakers were clearly in trouble. But what were we to do about it? President Jimmy Carter opted for the usual thing, appointing a blue-ribbon advisory committee to study America’s innovation system and find out what ailed it. It in turn produced a massive report that made only minuscule recommendations.

Others, however, spoke out with what seemed like brilliant clarity. This time around they did not blame conformity or crass, chrome-plated cars. It was Big Government, they said, that was crushing America’s creativity. Their solutions were simple and direct, and they got their way. In 1978, Congress slashed capital gains taxes on the grounds that doing so would reinvigorate the spirit of innovation. The Steiger Amendment, the measure was called: written by a Republican, passed by a Democratic Congress, and signed by a Democratic president, it was the first shot in the long and noisy tax-cut revolution that goes on to this day.

A curious detail about Ronald Reagan, the man who defeated Carter in 1980 and put the rollback of government into high gear: he was very fond of the word “creative.” The Creative Society was the title he gave to a collection of his speeches, and unleashing creativity was his polestar as he launched his market-oriented revolution. In 1988, he looked back with satisfaction on his achievements and spoke of a “new economy,” a sort of accelerated version of postindustrialism, in which capital was free to zip around the world electronically and “labor” had come to mean “the creativity of the writer of computer software.” This new economy, Reagan said, was outside the control of any kind of establishment: “It’s driven from the ground up by our new heroes, the entrepreneurs, the explorers of the modern era, who conceive, create, and produce, and in doing so discover the future one piece at a time.”

In this new understanding, creativity was identified not so much with artists or countercultural youth but with the act of entrepreneurship, the starting-up of a business. As the supply-side philosopher George Gilder put it in 1984, “The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power.” Creative people would deliver prosperity, so long as we deferred to them and made sure their taxes were low. Gilder went on: “An economy is governed by the will and imagination, creativity and persistence of its entrepreneurs. All that matters is that they be encouraged . . . to do their work well.”

The disassembly of the old liberal state has been a decades-long project, and at every step in the demolition, these ideas were what got the job done. Creativity and innovation were, persistently and comprehensively, the cover story for the neoliberal revolution. We privatized university research — and universities themselves, in effect — on the grounds that the profit motive would reinvigorate the creativity of the highly educated. We deregulated banks because we thought “financial innovation” would make us all rich. We wrote trade agreements that undermined the livelihoods of the blue-collar class because we knew it did not innovate. We offshored manufacturing because, in a postindustrial “new economy,” only creative work was worthy of protection and respect.

A zenith of some kind was reached during the presidency of Barack Obama, who understood innovation as the paramount object of enlightened governance. In a famous speech in 2011 he acknowledged the “painful disruptions” that were tearing the middle class apart, but even so, he insisted that in an “innovation economy” the only real answer was more and better education. Obama mentioned “innovation” or “innovators” in all seven of his State of the Union speeches, he proposed an “Innovation Agenda,” he published a series of innovation manifestos, and the executive branch resonated enthusiastically to the new imperative. The State Department, for example, launched the Transatlantic Innovation Action Partnership, the US-India Innovation Exchange, the NEXUS Innovation Initiative, the Global Innovation through Science and Technology program, and the American Innovation Roadshow. The Smithsonian dubbed 2015 the “Year of Innovation.” So committed was the Defense Department to the golden idea that, in one thirty-eight-minute speech in 2016, Secretary Ashton Carter managed to use some version of the word “innovation” sixty-seven times, calling for greater creativity in every aspect of warmaking and carefully name-checking the era’s great tech CEOs.

All these momentous efforts, undertaken over the decades to revive innovation and creativity . . . and yet the twin gods have never really returned. Writing and music and liberal-arts academia are career dead ends today, as everyone knows. Culturally speaking, the country is obviously stagnant, with its classic rock and its superhero movies. Politically, we are in an endless loop of the old identity politics versus backlash wars of the 1970s. We still drive cars and live in suburbs and travel on jet planes and blast our enemies with B-52s. And despite our tax cutting and our deregulating and even despite our very real advances in computers and telecommunications, productivity growth today lags well behind the pace of the ’50s and ’60s. Even in the unhappy year 1978, the economy grew at a rate of 5.5 percent, much greater than what we ordinarily achieve nowadays.

But we modern Americans have succeeded in discovering levels of inequality unknown to our ancestors. Today what economists call the “labor share” of national income is at all-time lows, as blue-collar workers are tossed overboard from the middle class. What we might call the “creative share,” meanwhile, is at all-time highs. In 1978, there were only two known billionaires in the United States. Today there are close to a thousand, cornering this market or that one, jacking up the price of medicine, injecting millions into political campaigns, collecting art, dispensing wisdom to the eager crowds at SXSW, building their end-times fortresses, chirping about how AI might end humanity, achieving remarkable levels of spiritual enlightenment, and absorbing the praise of the world for their innovativeness, their amazing powers of creativity.

Sometimes it feels as though the old middle-class society was undone by its dreams. “Equality is the antithesis of creativity,” an education magazine instructed Americans back in 1960. But we never understood the contradiction or considered the oligarchic downside. We loved equality and yet valued creativity over almost everything else: this is what we wanted for every child, the vague but all-American form of brilliance that would give us artistic achievement and spiritual satisfaction at the same time. It was a short walk from there to the cultlike adulation we routinely express for Steve Jobs, innovator and prophet, billionaire son of the old middle class.

Maybe the truth is that those creative billionaires are the only ones who really matter. “The creative person in a sense does something for all of us simply by being,” the psychologist Frank Barron declared back in the heady year 1969, “and perhaps we help ourselves when we help such persons in the process of their own creative unfolding.” Maybe their creativity trickles down to the rest of us the same way material prosperity is transmitted. Maybe building an elite that breaks things and smokes weed and cavorts around onstage with a deregulatory chainsaw is the best any nation can ask for. We gape and cheer and marvel at their enlightenment, for we know they elevate the rest of us simply by being.