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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 MalesDespite 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.
DeclineThe 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.
The numbers are without a doubt skewed. Come on... Saying 97 percent of the significant figures in sciences come from the west is like saying 90 percent of shark bite victims happen within 100 meters of the shoreline. Where did Murray receive his education? I suppose I'll have to read this book now. hmmmm, what to do this weekend, what to do...
The first spin is the fact that he chose the cutoff dates he did. If you chose cutoff dates of 2000 bce - 800 bce and 200 ad - 1200 ad, you'd decide that 97% of scientists and artists were Chinese, Arab, or Persian, and that Europeans were the giggling idiots of the planet.
The second spin is how he defines "significant."
I would think the author would go back to at least 2,000 BCE or even 10,000 and identify the collosal leap made in farming. For a species to go from forraging to agrigulture seems like an enormous effort of overlapping memes (and luck).
Can't wait to read the book.
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....this line:
"Moreover, the substantially greater demands of parenthood upon women make achievement harder."
The problem is that it's difficult to quantify the contribution of a stay-at-home Mom to her childrens' education, welfare, development, etc. It's very significant; it's just difficult to measure with numbers. "Achievement" means different things to different people.
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1. The west embraces the free marketplace of ideas more than others.
2. Western dead white males write the history books that most of us read.
The other significant problem with assigning "value" to more current achievements is that we have yet to find out what the implications of much research is. For instance, many people do not know who Mario Capecchi is, as he has yet to win a Nobel prize (but he will given his contributions to genetics). Furthermore, folks like Shakespeare were not recognized as the geniuses they were until long after their time on earth had passed.
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More to the point, given that his date range is 800 BCE to 1950 CE, and the Americas were colonies struggling to be self-sufficiant (with little time for art or science) up until about 1800 or so, that gives Europe a much larger time window.
And then there's a classification problem related to the increase in global travel post 1900-ish. Is Einstein American, or European?
As for the decline in achievement post 1800... that's probably because all the low-hanging fruit are gone. The remaining problems tend to be "hard" in some non-trivial sense.
DG
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was that blacks are inherently stupid, I'm not surprised that he comes to the conclusion in this book that Westerners do all the great work. Does George Washington Carver (presumeably an outlier on the Bell Curve) make the list?
Are there a dozen Shakespeares? Maybe! How would you know? There are dozens of great playwrights in the world today, and dozens of authors, etc. Which are today's Shakespeare? Ask me in three hundred years when can see which authors are still talked about and studied in school. Was Shakespeare hailed as "the Homer of today" at the time? No!
"Significant" figures in science are decreasing? Maybe it's because more science is being done by groups of scientists collaborating. If a dozen papers come out of one university research group, but each has a different author's name on the top, then is that less accomplishment than six papers with one author? I guess the accomplishments of groups of scientists working together isn't significant.
Frankly, I think the absence of "significant" figures is a sign of progress. It shows that our scientific base is widening, so that contributions come from a greater number of individuals. Contrast for example Galileo, one of the only people doing astrological work at the time. Whereas now there are observatories around the world with thousands upon thousands of individuals studying the stars, each making their own contributions.
This book sounds like crap, which I base half on the review and half on my opinion that the Bell Curve was crap. Knowing the way he covers his crap assumptions and the resulting crap conclusions with statistics and charts that seem reasonable at first, I'm seeing heavy potential for the same kind of thing here. Starting with taking whatever statistical feature he's actually looking at and calling it "Achievment", a mirror of taking scores from a military aptitude test and calling that "Intelligence".
But he'll probably get a lot of book sales from people who want to hear about how white folk from the west are the producers of all human achievment.
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I spent several years living in Korea among the Koreans. I've studied their culture and personality up-close and personal.
/Roman / European system we inherited. It used to be, "Do as the teacher says, memorize, and repeat". Now it is becoming, "Question the teacher, and when the teacher can't answer your questions, turn to other sources, or discover the answer for yourself." This is going counter to almost 5,000 years of history in that region.
Ask a Korean where all the science development occured, and they will point to Europe. Ask them what they have done to further humanity's knowledge and they might mutter something about a great world vision and system called Confucianism, but not much else.
It is true that recently (like in the past 50 years) Korea has experienced a rennaissance in that only now are their thinkers and artists truly free to express themselves. They understand that at this point, they are by no means pioneers. But soon their society will have "advanced" to a level that will be comparable with the European societies. They look to the West to find examples of great scientists, artists, political leaders (think American Revolution, Economic policy, etc...), in their effort to obtain the great wealth in all areas of life that we experience.
They are even now adjusting their entire education system to become like the Greek
The same holds true for Japan, China, and other Asian countries. It probably holds true for most of Africa, Australia, and even pre-1800's North and South America.
They literally contributed very, very little to humanity while the West was changing the world every 50 years or so. This is not racism, or me being and egotistical white male American, this is solid fact.
If you want to look at true human achievement, look at what the world is becoming. Only now do Asian, African, and other non-European begin to contribute to the arts and the sciences. Only now do you see advances in political and economical thought coming from there as well. This is all due to our natural sharing attitude, where we would rather teach and lift and bring others to our level than maintain our superiority with an iron fist. We understand that we are much more "wealthy" in true human achievemtn when we have two well-educated, intelligent people, than one well-educate and the other mis-educated.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Simple reason: increased competition leads to decreased fame. If you have dozens of Shakespeares, no single one of them is going to be as famous as if you have just one. Since the measure of success is necessarily some form of popularity contest, you cannot fairly compare Shakespeare's talent to modern talent. It's like saying Perrier is better than tap water when you tasted the former at noon on a hot day in Death Valley and the latter on a cold and rainy October day in Minnesota.
Nor can you say "I saw a Shakespeare play today and a Tom Stoppard play yesterday, and X is better." We have a culture that primes you for Shakespeare starting before Kindergarden, with all of those "Romeo and Juliet" references, among other things. Stoppard, on the other hand, writes for a post-Shakespeare audience, and builds on Shakespeare. You can't isolate one from the other, nor either from its environment.
I don't think so! I'll bet the great majority of sources are english and the rest are western european. Guess what? People tend to reference works written in their own native language! This is bias up the wazoo! So much for a neutral measure!
I've only spent about 5 minutes thinking about it, but a slightly less biased (but not neutral) measure would involve counting works translated into multiple languages. The idea being that if a work is worth the effort of importing from another language/culture, then it's more significant than an untranslated work.
The fact that Murray could build this obvious fundamental bias into his metric is laughable. Then to proceed blithely with the whole book pretending his metric is neutral is just absurd. A whole book about measuring science, and it's based on a warped ruler!
Truly, Schiller was right: against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
As a Korean-American, I find your condenscending, ignorant view of Koreans to be offensive.
Koreans were the first to develop printing blocks, water clocks, submarines, etc. Not to mentions the most scientific and graceful written languauge in the world - Hangul.
Koreans are very proud of their scientific and artistic achievements. And you if actually spent ANY time learning about their 4000 years of culture and achievements, then you wouldn't be spewing your little ignorant diatribe.
Koreans are adopting to some (NOT ALL) western culture and methods because that makes them competitive in the modern economic world. And if you really want to nitpick, they are modeling themselves after Japan more than any other western country (yes, Japan modeled much from US, but I would argue they have improved much upon the original).
What a nimcompoop...