Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray has been on the list for a while and I've been chipping away at it in bits and pieces in between other work.  I finally had a transatlantic business trip to put this guy away - my reaction - wow.  Not because the book is that great (it's perhaps better than average) but because of its audacity.

Murray certainly has no trouble pursuing rather grandiose arguments within the book - in this case the central role of the West in Human Achievement for nearly the past 500 years (from 800BC to 1950).   He takes on a big challenge but does manage to back it up with perhaps the best stab I've seen to date for quantifying an otherwise rather hard to quantify quality - eminence.

The methodology isn't quite flawless - this is far from the scientific undertaking that even works like the Bell Curve purport to be.   With the Bell Curve, Murray could fall back upon the maxim "I'm just reporting the bare facts from the preponderance of experts".   In Human Accomplishment, Murray wears all the hats - he's the primary character making the argument, creating the methodology, and reporting the results.   He's walking a much longer and lonelier figurative gangplank.

Murray's core tactic is to take a large number of survey / atlas / textbooks on a given series of subjects and count the number of references given to different individuals within those books.   So, for example, Isaac Newton gets a weighted score of 100 in the physics category because he is referenced in every single book on physics surveyed and often with passages devoted to his work as long as any other individual surveyed.  Using this technique he builds a rank ordered list of the top 100 or so figures in different areas of human endeavor including math, music, art, science, etc. 

[sidenote - Murray's anecdotes about these individuals, their accomplishments, and the fields of study in general are highly entertaining brainfood - even if you don't buy the central argument, the book is a GREAT survey of the high points of thought across 20 different subjects in history.]

Despite the inherent shakiness of the methodology, it is nevertheless difficult to come up with a better one or avoid the sheer forcefulness of the conclusion that data thrusts into the face of the reader - a relatively small % of the Earth's population has been consistently responsible for the vast majority of intellectual progress and achievement over a 500 year period.  Murray's technique may be only one way of answering this question but, it's hard to argue that it's intrinsicly corrupt at least for the subjects Murray chooses.  This guy gets a real thrill out of being non-PC.

In fact, Murray's book is decidedly one long polemic against PC.   I've always believed that there were 2 types of "Liberals" out there -

• Those who believe in the philosophical underpinnings of Rawlsian distributed justice and/or philosophical cosmic justice
• Those who are simply angry at rich / white / straight / old / males who don't self-flagellate enough

I can engage in constructive debate with the former but the latter ones, well, they are going to be PISSED about Murray's book.   As he notes after some 250 pages of number crunching and methodological defense -[p 246]

...the material in these chapters keeps returning to a time and place where the globe's accomplishment has been concentrated:   Euopre during the period from 1400 to 1950.  For some readers, that concentration of accomplishment is a fact requiring no further proof;   for others, it is a discredited Western conceit requiring no further consideration.

...The storyline implied by the graph on the following page is that not much happened from -800 until the middle of 15C, that really intense levels of accomplishent didn't begin until a few centuries ago (fully half of all significnat figures do not make their appearance until 1800 or after), and that from the middle of 15C to the beginning of 20C, almost everything came from Europe.   As late as the 1890s, 81 percent of the newly entereing significant figures were European.   The proportion contributed from anywhere Europe never rose above 40 percent through the 1940s.

There you have it - dead white males really did move the globe.   The philosophical Enlightenment with its emphasis on individual initiative, boundless optimism, and man's ability to triumph over raw nature - all seemingly naive notions given today's post-modernist zeitgeist - really did create "excellence".  

In light of Murray's hard quantitative data, our modern attempt to rewrite this historical record are exposed as almost laughable endeavors.  For example, on the topic of women, Murray brings up this anecdote - [p 265]

On the wall of Columbia University's mathematics library hang four large portraits of famous mathematicians:  Carl Gauss, Henri Poincare, Emmy Noether, and Sonya Kovalevskaya.   They are of somewhat different stature.   In the mathematics inventory for this book, Gauss ranks fourth, Poincare 26th.   Noether ranks 94th and Kovalevskaya 113th.   The 2:2 split between the sexes is also at odds with the split in mathematics inventory, which is 187:4.

Murray does a very admirable job of sorting and testing his analytic tools to root out potential systemic biases but doesn't venture far from his central conclusion - [p273]

Let us say for the sake of argument that the sources used for the inventories were so biased against women that they left out half of the women who should have been included.   In that case, the inventories should consist of 95.6 percent men instead of 97.8 percent men - a distinction without a difference

Readers who are curious about the other sources of bias that Murray handles should check out the book.   I can assure you that by my standards, he's done a reasonably thorough job of testing various hypothesis.

I personally have no problem with Murray's central thesis - that the dead white males of the Enlightenment and the philosophies to which they subscribed brought us far forward.   The historical record is clear and I'm at peace with it.  BUT, it's important to note that much of this is attributed to culture rather than race and I optimistically believe that all can participate in these cultural precepts and aspire to similar levels of Accomplishment.   This comfort is probably at the heart of my my libertarian political leanings and deep rooted optimism in technology, economics, and human liberty.  

I do have some trouble with side arguments that Murray raises at the end of the book asserting that these ideals are dying and that Achievement of this scale is a thing of the past.   I look at the entirely new subjects which have emerged since 1950 which demonstrate that excellence isn't dead.   I fully expect that in 20 yrs, the Internet will will be as central to life as electrification - but Murray's inventory simply don't account for the basket of inventions around it.   In Music, for example, Murray gives significant credit to the lofty achievemens of 17th and 18th century composers.  No question that this work is technically daunting - but how does that recognize entirely new and rather popular genres which have emerged such as Rap?

 

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UPDATE - a book review in Slate provides a taste of the types of rankings that Murray constructs -

On Page 126, Murray fields and ranks history's all-star physics dream team. They are, in descending order:

1. Isaac Newton
2. Albert Einstein
3. Ernest Rutherford
4. Michael Faraday
5. Galileo Galilei
6. Henry Cavendish
7. Niels Bohr
8. J.J. Thomson
9. James Maxwell
10. Pierre Curie
11. Gustav Kirchhoff
12. Enrico Fermi
13. Werner Heisenberg
14. Marie Curie
15. Paul Dirac
16. James Joule
17. Christiaan Huygens
18. Walter Gilbert
19. Thomas Young
20. Robert Hooke

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