by Charles Murray
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Product Description
Charles Murray's account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Murray compiles inventories of the people who have been essential to the stories of literature, music, art, philosophy, and the sciences - a total of 4,002 men and women from around the world, ranked according to their eminence. The heart of Human Accomplishment is a series of descriptive chapters: on the giants in the arts and what sets them apart from the merely great; on the differences between great achievement in the arts and in the sciences; on the meta-inventions, 14 crucial leaps in human capacity to create great art and science; and on the patterns and trajectories of accomplishment across time and geography.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Limited value , 2008-08-12
I was reluctant to read this book but read it because a reading group I belong to selected it. I agree with most of what it says, but was underwhelmed by what it accomplished.
He has compiled an impressive catalog of people who have accomplished excellent feats in arts, science, and technology.
He has a long section arguing that the disproportionate number of dead white males in his list is not a result of bias. Most of this just repeats what has been said many times before. He appears do have done more than most to check authorities of other cultures to verify that their perspective doesn't conflict with his. But that's hard to do well (how many different languages does he read well enough to avoid whatever selection biases influence what's available in English?) and hard for me to verify. He doesn't ask how his choice of categories (astronomy, medicine, etc) bias his results (I suspect not much).
His most surprising claim is that the rate of accomplishment is declining. He convinced me that he is measuring something that is in fact declining, but didn't convince me that what he measured is important. I can think of many other ways of trying to measure accomplishment: number of lives saved, number of people whose accomplishment was bought by a million people, number of people whose accomplishment created $100 million in revenues, the Flynn Effect, number of patents, number of peer-reviewed papers, or number of meta-innovations. All of these measures have nontrivial drawbacks, but they illustrate why I find his measure (acclaim by scholars) very incomplete. An incomplete measure may be adequate for conclusions that aren't very sensitive to the choice of measure (such as the male/female ratio of important people), but when most measures fail to support his conclusion that the rate of accomplishment is declining, his failure to try for a more inclusive measure is disappointing.
His research appears careful to a casual reader, but I found one claim that was definitely not well researched. He thinks that "the practice of medicine became an unambiguous net plus for the patient" around the 1920s or 1930s. He cites no sources for this claim, and if he had found the best studies on the subject he'd see lots of uncertainty about whether it has yet become a net plus.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Some of the conclusions are arguable, but someone had to do it, 2008-06-27
One of the things which has always befuddled me: why don't people study what it is that makes some people stand so far above the rest of us? In my opinion, people like Michelangelo, Newton and Shakespeare are what makes humanity interesting, rather than just a particularly successful species of primate. Why wouldn't we try to make more such people? It's obvious that greatness comes in clusters, so local conditions must have something to do with it. Consider Athens of Pericles, or Florence in the time of Cellini. Murray's book attempts to answer the question of why some people do so well, as well as providing a lifetime of subsequent reading with his list of the great human achievements in art, literature and science. Yes, there are methodological problems with his statistical measures. However, while the criticisms are obvious, I haven't seen anyone come up with obviously better ways of doing the measurements he did. More important is that he tried to do the measurements at all. Who is the greatest author? Who is the greatest painter, mathematician or scientist? What are the top ten achievements in Japanese literature? These are important questions, and, while Murray's regression models have obvious bias, the fact that he's using regression models, rather than "surveys of leading experts" (which is how most people seem to do such things) seems fundamentally less biased to me. At least this technique attempts to use some data.
The book itself consists of a lot of lists, descriptions of how statistics works, and methodological rationalizations. This might not make for exciting reading, but this isn't a book to be casually thumbed through. It's more a book which one can use for later reading, and to consider what humanity has accomplished.
Some of his conclusions will be controversial. Murray believes human achievement has slowed in the last 100-200 years. I'd have to agree with him, though I can see how others might not. Also; I have a hard time blaming the Thomist idea in Christianity for the mad creativity of Western Civilization. If anything, Thomism is a symptom of whatever it is that made Western Civilization so productive. The ideas of Thomas Aquinas were not accepted into mainstream Christianity for some years after his death, yet men like Witelo, Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Petrus Peregrinus and Albertus Magnus were his rough contemporaries and predecessors, and they invented scientific thought. Perhaps whatever it was which inspired these men to their ideas is to blame. I don't know how to put my finger on what it might be any better than Murray did, but I suppose his is a good guess.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 The Roots of Human Accomplishment, 2008-05-03
Why did most of the great creative accomplishments in history occur in Europe? Why were most of these achievements made by males? Why did certain oppressed groups hold their own (e.g. Jews), while others (e.g. women) did not? Why did the brief early flowering of creativity in China, Japan, and the Middle East quickly fizzle out, while it thrived in countries like England, France, Germany, Italy, and the USA? Was political freedom the key factor, or not?
It is a risky business in today's politically charged intellectual atmosphere to ask such questions. But Charles Murray is notorious for asking them, and in their full provocative force. He uses the accepted statistical methods of the social sciences to make his case and prove his thesis quantitatively. When he gives us his opinions, he makes it very clear that they are qualitative speculations and not science.
Murray's essential idea is that the collective opinion of the experts can be used to enumerate and evaluate a hierarchy of great accomplishments and those who made them. This means in practice that to find out who was best in each category, the researcher must study the historians and commentators in the field in question, then do an analysis of the results. This seems reasonable, and it may be the best method available for social science to undertake such a task. An alternative method might be a historiography in the style of Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, although that method might be not be capable of answering the types of questions Murray raises. This reviewer thinks the historical / pragmatic method enunciated by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn works best, at least as pertains to which theories in the hard sciences should be recognized, but that's another story.
There are certain intrinsic problems with Murray's method, the main one being that we are obliged to make our judgments and draw our conclusions on the basis of a poll. This amounts to deciding if something is good or not by asking the opinions of others. The caveat, of course, is that those being polled are experts, and theoretically they possess a superior capacity to be objective in the subject at hand, because they know the most about it. This amounts to a kind of "collective objectivity," and this also seems reasonable -- except for the fact that even the greatest of experts are often proven wrong over the course of time. So yes, Murray's method is scientific, but it is a limited, if not flawed method nonetheless.
The creators, or fountainheads, of history have often had to overcome the consensus of the experts. After a difficult battle, waged by some of the stars of Murray's story, Galen and Ptolemy were ultimately proven completely wrong and replaced. But they are obvious examples of creators who espoused vastly popular theories of long duration that were once favored by the experts. Aristotle's biology also belongs in this category, or should, but curiously he still retains the number two slot (in Murray's scheme) under Darwin. A more modern example might be the case of Nikola Tesla. Edison, and to a lesser degree Marconi, outstripped him in the rankings, but an objective and factual case could be made that Tesla exceeded both in the quality and quantity of his achievements.
There is no guarantee that time will rectify these inequities in any particular case. But this, in part, is why Murray refrains from taking contemporary opinions, however expert, into account. One could agree that he reduces some of the error resulting from fads and flashes-in-the-pan by giving the experts time to put current popular choices into perspective, but sometimes there will never be a resolution consistent with the facts.
Were Plato's or Aristotle's political or artistic theories (not to mention their philosophical ones) correct? The experts may never agree. In another area, can any amount of time, as Murray finds, ever render Picasso's art second only to Michelangelo's? I'll leave that in the form of a question for art connoisseurs to ponder. There are many other such examples in the book, and readers will have fun picking their own favorites.
One of the ironies of modern scientific etiquette is that the scholar must disguise his subjective opinions and hide them under the mantle of "qualitative description." For me, the best parts of the book were such description. In the concluding chapters of his book, Murray combines qualitative description with a quantitative analysis of the results which make his conclusions possible. Some examples are as follows:
1. Peace and prosperity coupled with war and unrest, as long as it is not a total or devastating war, spurs human accomplishment. Examples given are the Golden Age of Athens and Renaissance Italy (332-33).
2. Economic wealth spurs accomplishment. Examples are Renaissance Florence, 16th century Spain, (337) and the early Islamic Empire. But there are also numerous examples given as to why such spurts of accomplishment are not sustained, e.g., religious or government restrictions, love of luxury, and a poor work ethic.
3. Self Reinforcement: As new artists and scientists come on the scene, they influence the younger generations to follow their example (353-54). This is true as long as conditions remain favorable to achievement.
4. Critical Mass: Cities, especially thriving ones with relative political freedom, are the breeding ground for accomplishment. Examples are; Florence, Edinburgh, Paris, Konigsberg, Geneva, London, and New York (356).
5. Freedom of Action: Relative freedom for individual pursuits does not necessarily correlate with political democracy; it may also occur in monarchies and oligarchies. De facto freedom of action is the key. Women, for example, have been emancipated in some societies long before achieving de facto liberty. Conversely, Murray states, "Totalitarian states effectively quash human accomplishment in the arts and philosophy. They are only slightly less stifling in the sciences..." (362).
6. Is human accomplishment on the decline in recent times as the trend lines seem to indicate, and what are the reasons? This is a complex issue and Murray's analysis here is one of the most interesting parts of the book.
Does Murray definitively answer any of the questions raised at the beginning of this review, or others like it? My opinion is that he goes a long way toward answering some, and he provides leads to answering others, which other scientists will have to pick up on.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
This is a human accomplishment!, 2007-10-05
Charles Murray is a gutsy social scientist. Back in 1994, he co-wrote the excellent Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) with Richard Herrnstein. The onslaught of controversy from the politically correct faction exhausted Herrnstein (he died not long after the release of the book). But, Murray kept on trucking and a decade later released another politically incorrect outstanding bombshell with this book.
Being aware of the topic's controversial nature, Murray spends nearly as much time explaining his statistical methodology as he does analyzing results. After reading Murray's disclosure, you're overwhelmed by his data gathering effort. And, you are hard pressed to think off how a researcher could have been more objective in this endeavor.
From his extensive data, he develops a ranking of the top 20 contributors in tens of different fields. The usual suspects dominate the podium. In Western literature it is Shakespeare and Goethe. In Western Art, it is Michelangelo. In Physics, it is Newton and Einstein. In Western music it is the usual trio Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. And so on and so forth.
Murray makes a great effort in capturing non-Western culture by dedicating several inventories/rankings specifically for them, including numerous disciplines for the Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cultures. His research methodology renders him as well versed in Japanese Art as Arabic Literature. His related analytical commentaries are fascinating and educative.
Murray preempts politically correct concerns by addressing them head on. How about representation of women? As an abstract of his findings, if you are looking for the greatest composers of all time it is just impossible to come up with an alternative to the Mozart-Beethoven-Bach trio. And, the same is true for the other rankings he developed. He mentioned that in his gathered inventory of significant figures 98.5% are male. Speculating that all the well established sources had been heavily biased against women and had missed 50% of such significant figures; that would mean the percentage of male/female significant figures would be 97%/3% instead of 98.5%/1.5%. Murray does not believe the mentioned sources were biased. But, he adds even if they were it would not have made a material difference as stated above. Murray explicitly states men and women are of equal intelligence. It is just that our societies are patriarchal. Access to activities leading to superlative achievements is limited for women. Biologically, women incur the burden of reproduction and child rearing that is a constraint on the maniacal focus needed to become one of the all-time-greats in anything.
How about representation of foreign cultures? As mentioned, Murray already dedicated numerous inventories/rankings to other cultures to give them more than their fair share of representation.
After ranking individuals, Murray goes on to developing chronologies of major events in all the mentioned disciplines. Then, he moves on to analyzing trends in creativity over time and geographical location. You get that just a few places over short period of times generated an inordinate number of luminaries such as Athens during the Greek antiquity and a few Italian cities during the Renaissance.
Murray is intrigued by this phenomenon. In chapters 15 and 16, he analyzes the factors contributing to generating many luminaries at any one time within a specific country. From his multivariate regression models we learn that the major contributing variables to generating such luminaries per country are: 1) # of political and financial centers; 2) # of cities with an elite university; 3) population of the largest city; 4) # of luminaries in the immediate preceding generation (defined as a 20 year span); and 5) GDP per capita. On page 380, he discloses the results of this model. And, it is surprisingly good. Using this model he estimated within + or - 10 the number of luminaries per country from 1400 to 1950. Less than 5% of the defined per country-period have an error greater than + or - 10 in the estimated number of luminaries.
Next, Murray attempts to explain what the model has not. He extensively looks at the role of government with the expected assessment (totalitarian ones are bad as they don't allow individual creativity). He also advances that the reason why Europeans dominate the rankings is because of religious considerations. Confucianism and Buddhism in Asia valued tradition, family, responsibility to community, and detachment from desire and individual aspiration. Murray feels Christianity allowed more room for individual achievements hence related human accomplishments thrived in Europe more than else where. Murray makes a case that Christianity fostered human accomplishments more than our modern secularism. This is because he feels religion gives a greater sense of life purpose than secularism. He extends his theory by explaining why he feels that the rate and quality of innovation in the arts and sciences has declined in the 20th century. Remember, he is not talking just about technology. He is questioning whether our civilization will ever produce music composers of the quality of a Beethoven, or painters comparable to Michelangelo, playwright matching Shakespeare, or even scientists matching Newton or Einstein (ok this last one is just on the cusp belonging in good part to the first half of the 20th century). Even though many would disagree, Murray makes a very interesting point. Do we really have another Michelangelo or Shakespeare to come?
For a much different view of the interaction between science and religion, I also recommend Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Mike Shermer's Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Statistics, what statistics?, 2007-08-28
The author tries to establish a statistical basis for "excellence". Apparently the argument is: because the Lotka curve applies to excellent golfers, and to commonly celebrated musicians or scientists, it follows that commonly celebrated musicians or scientists are excellent. [From the statistical basis provided, I'd guess the Lotka curve applies just as well to rare weather patterns or extreme events on the stock market]. The author admits to logical uncertainty in his probability argument (see [1] below), but assumes anyway that it validates his methods. He shores it up with the notion that anybody who remains noted over an extended time deserves it, and with the "face validity" test, which amounts to "if I recognise a famous name, that person is famous for good reason" (see [2] below).
The value of the book is in asking a lot of very hard questions, and showing that evaluating human accomplishment is no easy task. However, the value of the book is not in its answers to these hard questions.
[1] "These remarks by no means dispose of the argument about whether we are looking at fame or excellence.", quote from p. 106
[2] The results "look reasonable to a knowledgeable observer". quote from p. 80
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