Creativity
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 | The English used in this article or section may not be easy for everybody to understand. (December 2023) |
Creativity is the ability to make something new. Creativity is involved in all parts of life - including science, art, writing and music.
Creativity is difficult to measure. We do not understand why people are creative. It can be controversial to judge creativity. Some people say that making something is only creative if the thing has never been made before.
Some think that creativity is an important thing that makes humans different from apes. Other people think that apes and other animals use creativity to survive. Liane Gabora believes that culture comes from creativity, it does not come from imitation (copying). Because of this, these people say that human science should focus on creativity (pay special attention to it). Ethics (the study of what is right and wrong) could try to find creative solutions (fixes) for ethical problems. Politics could focus on the political virtues that need some creativity. Imitation would not be the focus of education. Linguistics might be more interested in how new words are created by culture, rather than in how existing ones are used in grammar.
Intellectual interests (recognized as intellectual rights or intellectual property in the law) are a way to reward creativity in law, but they do not always work very well. A good example is copyright which is supposed to pay writers and artists, but may only pay lawyers to make (imitative) arguments in court.
Creativity is an important idea in economics (the study of money and businesses), where it is known as ingenuity (the ability to come up with new ideas) or individual capital - capacities that individuals have, that do not arise from simple imitation of what is known already. This is separate from the instructional capital that might try to capture some of that in a patent or training system that helps others do what the individual leader or founder of the system can do. In urban economics there are various ways to measure creativity - the Bohemian Index and Gay Index are two attempts to do this accurately and predict the economic growth of cities based on creativity.
