The Creativity Crisis

Newsweek

Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.

I’d like to offer a simple reason why this is the case: creativity is risky. A parent can steer their child towards a “safe” profession like medicine or law and be reasonably assured of a good, prosperous future. But technology-, art- and science-oriented professions are much more prone to extremes of success and failure that our society is not equipped to handle well. Similarly, in the business world, CEOs are not rewarded for taking risks: although companies usually benefit by genial risk taking, the person who takes the risk is often ostracized because investors are focused on short-term profit.

Examples of this are all around us: you don’t need to be a financial genius to see the amount of crap that floods our movie theatres to realize what rare gems the likes of Pixar are—particularly when you consider that Steve Jobs had to sink millions into it before it started turning a profit. At the other end of the spectrum, you have Lloyd Braun, the ABC executive who got canned for greenlighting what was, at the time, the most expensive series pilot ever produced by the network. The show? Oh, just a little something called Lost.