Two decades ago, he asked what’s the matter with Kansas? Now he’s back to look at the 70-year con of ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’

“Look at this sweatshirt,” Thomas Frank says over a video interview from his study in Bethesda, Md. He pulls at his maroon hoodie, which he’d just picked up from a thrift store the other day. The badge on his chest reads “Innovation Fitness.”

“These words are everywhere now,” he says with his ever-present smile and laugh. “It’s total saturation.”

Frank has spent three decades arguing that Americans misread and misunderstand their own economy, perhaps most famously in his 2004 modern classic, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which followed his evolution from college Republican to something else and probed why so many people from his native Kansas City area voted against what he understood as their class interests. His latest, The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America’s Biggest Racket, takes aim at a staple of business journalism: the idea of “innovation” as something fundamental to American business.

Frank is gracious toward Fortune, which publishes America’s Most Innovative Companies, runs the Fortune Innovation Forum and Workplace Innovation Summit, and hosts a “Leaders in Innovation” series. “You guys have been very critical of all the stuff you ordinarily cover,” he says. He recalls that The Baffler, the magazine he co-founded in 1988, kept a stack of old Fortunes in its office. “We had this huge box of back issues,” he says, recalling the great painted art-deco artwork that Fortune was known for in the 1930s and ’40s. “We used to just sit there in the office and pore over it.”

Much of Frank’s book is about the cult of innovation and creativity that dates back to the postwar years. Much of the modern concept traces back to, of all things, the mind of an ad-man straight out of Madison Avenue: Alex Osborn, the “O” in BBDO. Among........

© Fortune