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

692 Pages·2004·9.08 MB·English

by  Charles Murray

Human
Accomplishment
The Pursuit of Excellence
in the Arts and Sciences,
800 . . to 1950
B C
C M
HARLES URRAY
To
Irwin Stelzer, Charles Krauthammer, and Harlan Crow
It turns out I had brothers after all
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments v
A Note on Presentation ix
Introduction xi
PART ONE
A Sense of Accomplishment 1
1. A Sense of Time 3
2. A Sense of Mystery 13
3. A Sense of Place 25
4. A Sense of Wonder 53
PART TWO
Identifying the People and Events That Matter 57
5. Excellence and Its Identification 59
6. The Lotka Curve 87
7. The People Who Matter I: Significant Figures 107
8. The People Who Matter II:The Giants 119
9. The Events That Matter I: Significant Events 155
10. The Events That Matter II: Meta-Inventions 209
PART THREE
Patterns and Trajectories 245
11. Coming to Terms with the Role of Modern Europe 247
12. . . . and of Dead White Males 265
13. Concentrations of European and American Accomplishment 295
14. Taking Population into Account:The Accomplishment Rate 309
15. Explanations I: Peace and Prosperity 331
16. Explanations II: Models, Elite Cities, and Freedom of Action 353
17. What’s Left to Explain? 379
iv • CONTENTS
PART FOUR
On the Origins and Decline of Accomplishment 383
18. The Aristotelian Principle 385
19. Sources of Energy: Purpose and Autonomy 391
20. Sources of Content:The Organizing Structure
and Transcendental Goods 409
21. Is Accomplishment Declining? 427
22. Summation 449
APPENDICES 459
1. Statistics for People Who Are Sure They Can’t Learn Statistics 461
2. Construction of the Inventories and the Eminence Index 475
3. Inventory Sources 491
4. Geographic and Population Data 505
5. The Roster of the Significant Figures 513
Notes 589
Bibliography 625
Index 639
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Charles Murray
Credits
Cover
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 unre-
served 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 achieve-
ment, 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.
vi • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
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 empha-
sis: 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 Accomplish-
ment 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 assis-
tants 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 experi-
ence, 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 chal-
lenges and its meddlesome author with equal measures of skill and patience.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • vii
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

A NOTE ON
PRESENTATION
H
uman Accomplishment uses several devices to organize an unwieldy
body of material. Boxed text is scattered throughout the book for
excursions that I think are worth including but can be skipped. Brackets
around an endnote number indicate that the note contains additional detail.
The appendices are reserved for full-scale discussion of methods and for the
presentation of data too bulky to fit in the text.
I have adopted two conventions for labeling centuries and years to
minimize the clutter in a text filled with dates. One is to refer to a century by
its number followed by a capital C, so that, for example, the eighteenth century
becomes 18C. The second is to dispense with BC and AD or their more
recent replacements BCE and CE. The putative year of Christ’s birth has
become the world’s cross-cultural base year for a dating system, even in coun-
tries that still use another base year in their own calendars, so I will treat it as
such and be done with it. Thus 300 AD becomes simply 300 and 300 BC
becomes –300. One other convention involving dates should be kept in
mind: A span of time designated (for example) “1400–1600” should be read
as “1400 to the outset of 1600,”not “1400 through 1600.” Thus the two peri-
ods 1400–1600 and 1600–1800 do not overlap.
On matters involving alternative spellings of names, their order (e.g.,
“Leonardo da Vinci” or “da Vinci, Leonardo”), birth dates, death dates, or
fluorit dates, I used the consensus version whenever one existed and otherwise
followed the source I judged to be most authoritative.
Chinese names, places, and phrases are usually transliterated using the
Pinyin system. For Chinese historical figures and places that are well known
in the West by labels the Chinese themselves do not use, I have used the