Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

799 Pages·2016·11.91 MB·English

by  Charles Murray

Human Accomplishment
The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
CHARLES MURRAY
To
Irwin Stelzer, Charles Krauthammer, and Harlan Crow
It turns out I had brothers after all
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Note on Presentation
Introduction
PART ONE
A Sense of Accomplishment
1. A Sense of Time
2. A Sense of Mystery
3. A Sense of Place
4. A Sense of Wonder
PART TWO
Identifying the People and Events That Matter
5. Excellence and Its Identification
6. The Lotka Curve
7. The People Who Matter I: Significant Figures
8. The People Who Matter II: The Giants
9. The Events That Matter I: Significant Events
10. The Events That Matter II: Meta-Inventions
PART THREE
Patterns and Trajectories
11. Coming to Terms with the Role of Modern Europe
12. …and of Dead White Males
13. Concentrations of European and American Accomplishment
14. Taking Population into Account: The Accomplishment Rate
15. Explanations I: Peace and Prosperity
16. Explanations II: Models, Elite Cities, and Freedom of Action
17. What’s Left to Explain?
PART FOUR
On the Origins and Decline of Accomplishment
18. The Aristotelian Principle
19. Sources of Energy: Purpose and Autonomy
20. Sources of Content: The Organizing Structure and Transcendental
Goods
21. Is Accomplishment Declining?
22. Summation
APPENDICES
1. Statistics for People Who Are Sure They Can’t Learn Statistics
2. Construction of the Inventories and the Eminence Index
3. Inventory Sources
4. Geographic and Population Data
5. The Roster of the Significant Figures
Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Charles Murray
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
H
uman Accomplishment consumed my professional life from the fall of 1997
to the end of 2002, almost to the exclusion of the research on social policy that is
my stock in trade. Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), where I am a fellow, gave me his unreserved support throughout
this long project, as did my colleagues and the Institute’s trustees. AEI is a
wonderful home for intellectual inquiry.
In the literature on historiometric analysis of greatness and achievement, one
name dominates: Dean Keith Simonton, whose works fill a shelf in my library.
He generously shared his expertise with an outsider coming into his domain and
provided invaluable guidance. If you want to know more about almost any topic
in this book, go to the list of Simonton references in the bibliography.
At the outset of the project, Michael Novak predicted in his gentle way that I
would find Christianity’s role in Western human accomplishment to be pivotal. I
privately doubted him (it seemed to me that the Greeks had set the stage without
Christianity), but he opened my mind to possibilities that came to fruition in
material you will find in Part 4—the most important, but only one, of Michael’s
many contributions to the book.
As I worked my way through the quantitative analyses in Part 3, I turned
first to Douglas Hibbs, a friend since he was on my dissertation committee 30
years ago. Others who responded to my many requests for consultation on
technical matters were AEI colleagues Kevin Hassett, Nicholas Eberstadt, John
Lott, and Brent Mast, plus anonymous others who provided help at second-hand
as my queries were circulated.
Christopher DeMuth, Richard Posner, and Joan Kennedy Taylor undertook
the daunting task of reading the entire draft, providing strategic comments along
with line-by-line editorial advice.
with line-by-line editorial advice.
My topic required that I deal with disparate technical subjects. Kevin Grau,
Miles Hoffman, and Roger Kimball were especially unstinting in their response
to queries about issues involving the histories of science, music, and aesthetics
respectively. I also gratefully acknowledge the review of many others who had
expertises I lack: Munawar Anees, Eileen Blumenthal, Harlan Crow, John
Derbyshire, Henry Harpending, Masaaki Harada, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Ralph
Holloway, Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Marvin Kruger, James Lilley,
Elizabeth Lurie, Richard McNally, Steven Reiss, Samuel Schulman, Irwin
Stelzer, Scott Tanona, Steven and Kazuko Tripp, Arthur Waldron, Benjamin
Wong, José Zalaquett, Kate Zhou, and others who prefer to remain anonymous.
The responsibility for mistakes that remain are mine, with this emphasis:
Almost all of the people I just named did not see the full manuscript, but isolated
pages of draft. None saw the final manuscript that went to press. That a name
appears in the paragraphs above does not imply that person’s seal of approval on
anything.
I enjoy everything about the kind of research that Human Accomplishment
entailed, so I did as much as I could myself. But there was too much to do alone,
so I enlisted help along the way. Thanks go to AEI research assistants and
interns who took on tasks at one time or another over the years: Hans Allhoff,
Bion Bliss, Masaaki Harada, Daniel Mindus, Todd Ostroske, Sara Russo, Julian
Sanchez, and Sharon Utz.
The publishing business with which I have interacted for almost 20 years has
been filled all along with nothing but engaging, able people who had the best
interest of each book at heart. Not every writer has this experience, I am told.
That it has been mine is because my agent, Amanda Urban, has made it so. It is
high time that I acknowledge how important she has been to my professional
life. For this book, Amanda arranged matters so that I should have the pleasure
of being edited by Hugh van Dusen, whom I didn’t meet face-to-face for the first
four years, after we had long since developed an epistolary friendship in the best
Victorian tradition. In John Yohalem, I had a copy editor of formidable erudition
who spotted obscure historical errors as fast as syntactical ones. Bob Bull coped
with the book’s many design challenges and its meddlesome author with equal
measures of skill and patience.
Catherine Bly Cox is the other editor of Human Accomplishment, as she has
been of everything I have published since 1982. I doubt whether there is a page
of text in the book that has not been improved by her red pen. But she was also
my wife throughout this most difficult project. Her role in getting me through it
was of a kind for which thanks are both inadequate and superfluous.
Charles Murray
Burkittsville
3 August 2003