Human Accomplishment 620
| Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 | |
| author | Charles Murray |
| pages | 688 |
| publisher | HarperCollins |
| rating | Thought-provoking |
| reviewer | Joel Eidsath |
| ISBN | 006019247X |
| summary | A statistical history of human accomplishment. |
For our species' resume, you probably would not list to put "Defeated Hitler" as one of humanity's accomplishments, because it sounds too much like 'Beat my Heroin Addiction.' You would want to include things like 'Painted the Roof of the Sistine Chapel' or 'Discovered General Relativity.' In other words, you would want to include examples of human excellence throughout the ages.
Not only has Murray set out to compile this resume, but he sought to do it for a reason that is at the same time both interesting and audacious: once you have compiled a list of the several thousand most important creators and discoverers of all time, you can stick it into a database. The idea is that with this database a person can spot trends in accomplishment; he can identify regions and cities where excellence has clustered; he can evaluate qualities of political systems that spur innovation and those that stifle it. Murray's book is a stunning profusion of graphs and plots that do much more to teach us about accomplishment that most narrative histories.
For this to work, however, Murray first had to tackle the problem of differing opinions on who exactly deserves a place in the database. Everybody's list would differ -- yours, mine, and Charles Murray's. There would be substantial similarities between our lists, to be sure; nobody is going to leave out Newton, Darwin, Goethe, Shakespeare, Confucius, or al-Mutanabbi. But when it comes to lesser achievements, the arguments would be endless. Does Hooke make it into the list of the top 20 physicists of all time, or does Pascal make it into the list of the top 10 mathematicians?
So what Murray has done is to split up accomplishment into a number of fields and tried to take a neutral measure of each person's respective 'eminence' in the field. He measures 'eminence' by taking a number of comprehensive sources on each field and counting the references to each person and how many paragraphs they get. The sources are from as many different languages as possible and Murray does a good job of avoiding the distorting effects of ethnocentrism. He uses sharp cutoff dates at 800 B.C. and 1950 A.D. to limit the data.
What Murray winds up with is a procedurally neutral measure of human accomplishment that is stable when new sources are added or taken away, and also has good face validity. In Medicine, for example, Pasteur is first with an index score of 100, Koch is third with 90 and Freud (for clinical descriptions of mental illnesses) is 18th with a score of 34.
The Lotka Curve
Murray's other major work made a certain kind of statistical curve a household word, and Human Accomplishment prepares a second candidate for improving public statistical awareness: the Lotka Curve. In the mid-1920s, Alfred Lotka noticed an interesting pattern in scientific journals. About 60% of people publish only one article for a journal. The number of people publishing more that this falls off very fast with the number of articles. This makes up a Lotka curve and is almost L shaped.It turns out that in just about every field of human accomplishment significant figures fall along a Lotka curve. In Western literature, Shakespeare is far out along the horizontal part of the curve, Goethe a bit less so, and a whole host of lesser figures make up the nearly vertical part of the data set.
Dead White Males
Despite using several data collection techniques that wind up exaggerating the influence of non-Western cultures, Murray's data shows a strong majority of Westerners among the significant figures of world history.
Fully 97% of significant figures in the sciences come from the West. The same figure is arrived at from looking only at significant events. Even America is dwarfed by European accomplishment in the sciences, hosting less than 20% of significant figures before 1950 compared to Europe's nearly 80%. Europe's dominance over America is even greater in the arts. And though Murray makes sure to calculate what is an upper limit for artistic accomplishment in non-Western parts of the world, the graph is substantially the same as that for the sciences.
One of the astonishing parts of Murray's data is how it demonstrates the significant effects of legal equality. Jewish achievement after 1850 skyrocketed due to their newfound position before the law. Between 1910 and 1950, Jewish achievement tripled despite even the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
The graph of the achievement of woman displays a different pattern, despite their having gained substantial legal equality in the past century. Though there are slight increases in the numbers, women only represent a few percent of Murray's significant figures after 1900. Nor does the data available for the years beyond 1950 bear out any substantial increase in women's achievement during the second half of the twentieth century. Murray provides several possible explanations. Despite legal equality, women did not gain the same degree of immediate social equality that other groups did. Moreover, the substantially greater demands of parenthood upon women make achievement harder.
Decline
The last section of Human Accomplishment is somewhat surprising. When adjusted for population, Murray's numbers show a decline in accomplishment after 1800. When numbers are used that take not only total population in account, but also urban population and educated population, the decline has brought us down to nearly pre-Renaissance levels. For example, we have 65 playwrights alive today for every one in Elizabethan England. Yet do we have dozens of Shakespeares? The picture is even more stark when the 12,000 members of the screen Writers Guild are taken into account.
As a percentage, the number of significant figures in the sciences compared to the total population has dropped a great deal; this is despite a far greater percentage of working scientists and far more science and technical journals being published.
Murray goes through the data and shows why he believes that the decline is real and is not explicable by any procedural artifacts brought about by his methods. It is a somewhat disturbing conclusion to a great work.
You can purchase Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Typical Murray (Score:1, Interesting)
Because of the clear subjectivity in deciding what makes something an achievement he is free to exercise his partiality.
It may be asking too much to ask for a book that contains no stupid figures but then didn't we all cotton on to his agenda back in 1994?
Time will tell (Score:5, Interesting)
All about the frames, all about the assumptions (Score:4, Interesting)
It sounds like an interesting read, perhaps, but I tend to need to take these kinds of things with a whole shakerfull of salt. Human civilization is something that is occurring over a timescale of millions of years, not a couple thousand, and it is the seemingly inescapable tendency of every age to think it can see past the cultural and temporal blinders and set down the "objective" view of the way things are. If you believe anyone really has it, I've got a bottle of phlogiston to sell you.
Re:Yeah, Right ... (Score:2, Interesting)
My god man, that was the period of time where human civilization changed the most. Life today is scarcely different than it was in 1950 except now we have television and personal computers. Our work is the same, our homes are the same, our military is the same. The post-war world has been about refinement of technology invented in the time period you mention. I would argue that there haven't been ANY ground breaking inventions SINCE WWII. Nothing we have today would surprise anyone living in 1945. It was all expected.
No, I would say technological progress has slowed very much since WWII. Progress implies innovaction, revolution, change for the better... Not mere refinement.
Re:A nit on the "dead white males" section... (Score:2, Interesting)
My SO makes more than me. However, she's not in IT. To a certain extent the glass ceiling is starting to give way, but there is the problem of maternity that tends to make employers 'female-shy'.
"invent new technologies"
Lady Ada Byron?
"lead successful companies"
Anita Roddick? Carly Fiorina?
"Man affects the present. It is the teaching of the mother in the home that affects the future."
*cough* so the single parent families are screwed, then?
Re:A nit on the "dead white males" section... (Score:3, Interesting)
*cough* so the single parent families are screwed, then?
Not at all. However, a strong family with a mother and father have proven to be better for society. With the dramatic increase in divorce rates in the past several decades, we can also see a decline in test scores and increases in crime. This is not an attack against single parents -- I know many excellent single parents who are raising good kids -- but the statistics show that a two-parent family (that is, a male and femail) produces better kids than a single parent family. It should be preferred over a single parent family, but that does not mean that single parent family cannot also work out well. It is just a lot more difficult. Sadly, there is often not a choice in the matter.
Re:2 reasons for the West's dominance (Score:3, Interesting)
scripsit back_pages:
I think you've backed into an important problem with the methodology of this study -- it priveleges the work of individuals who get credit as individuals. Who invented zero? Ahmed Cipher? We don't have his name, so even though he (it probably was a he...) invented one of the most important mathematical concepts of all time, he gets zero paragraphs of mention.
On the flipside, ancient thinkers may be overrated, because of the tendency of premodern thinkers to attribute their ideas to ancient authorities even when they were original. There are plenty of authors we know only as Pseudo-Dionysus or the Pseudo-Areopagite -- how many other works were written by people we don't know of and given `Aristotle' or whomever for an `author'?
A resume for the whole human species (Score:1, Interesting)
That's all momma nature cares about and everything else is antropomorphic nonsense that any imaginary, objective (presumably non-human) reader of the resume would discount!
Western Superiority (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a woman. As a Western woman I have the right to receive the same kind of education and health care as male individuals. And I have the right to compete with them in the work place. It is true that it may not, as yet, be competing on equal terms[*], but that is a situation I believe is slowly but surely changing. Thanks to advances in Western medicine, I can reasonably expect not to die at childbirth and I can also reasonably expect any child of mine to survive infancy: in fact, both of us can, thanks to medical science and vastly improved living conditions (including both nutrition and hygiene) to live reasonably long lives. I have the right to vote and I also have the right to stand for office. I have the right to walk down the street, dressed however, without a male chaperone in the middle of the night without being harassed in any way. Yes, I admit that that right is unfortunaly violated far too often, but that doesn't actually mean that I don't have that right, nor that my society, should my right be violated, wouldn't try to correct it. I can marry whomever I want and I don't have to ask anyone's (be it my father, my brother or my husband) permission -- not even as a token gesture. I cannot legally be treated as an inferior individual. I am not deemed a as somehow 'unclean' when I am menstruating. No one can mutilate my body without my explicit say-so. In short, my life is my own: to do with as I please.
How is Western culture superior? Let me count the ways...
[*]Please note that I wrote 'equal' not 'the same'.