Rating: 
Summary: It's a joy to see what humans can accomplish
Review: This is a great book to poke around in. Of the Indians Murray cites, I'd only read Kautilya.
Why do musicians rank Wagner's dull crap so high?
Was the Catholic 'organum' method of singing prayers a joke on Aristotle's book on logic, or (massive anachronism, but Greeks sang too) the other way around?
Poke, poke.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Failure
Review: This is an interesting attempt to document the historical trajectory of human creativity/accomplishment. Murray's reasonable approach is to use existing reference works to catalogue significant creative persons and accomplishments in the arts and sciences. In several fields, Murray selected a set of hopefully comprehensive sources and then identifies individuals mentioned in a majority of these works. Murray then derives measures of creative accomplishments, their rates over time, and their association with specific historical periods or cultures.
The success of Murray's attempt can be judged on three grounds; methodological, validity of conclusions, and novelty of valid conclusions. The first two criteria are obvious but it is the novelty of predictions that is the most important. The production of novel, unexpected and counterintuitive valid claims is the best measure of a new theory or approach.
If there is something wrong with Murray's datasets/lists, then the whole enterprise is suspect. Murray finds a high level of correlation among his sources. This is reassuring but doesn't exclude shared, systemic biases among his sources. Inspecting several lists discloses problems. In the biology list and the medicine list, there is substantial under-reporting of significant figures. The Biology list is biased also towards genetics, physiology, biochemistry, and early cell biology. While some evolutionary biologists are mentioned, there is little attention to many traditional areas of biology and newer areas such as Ecology. I suspect the same problem occurs with the lists for math and technology. Murray's list for Western philosophy includes several theologians but none after 1850, a significant omission. Murray attempts cross-cultural comparisons with separate lists for Western, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese literature. The number of significant figures in Chinese literature is 1/10 of those on the Western literature list (about 600 to 60). An obvious feature of the comprehensive Western list is the large number of minor figures included. I find it hard to believe that 2000 years of Chinese culture haven't produced a substantial number of poets and other writers equivalent to these minor figures. Murray has been somewhat unfair to non-Western cultures in other ways. He has a list for Western music but not non-Western music. Murray has no list for Islamic philosophy, arguing that essentially all Islamic philosophy is derivative commentaries on Greek philosophers. Perhaps correct, but the Western philosophy list includes a number of theologians. To be fair, Islamic theologians should have a list. These problems with his basic datasets undermine confidence in his results.
Many of Murray's conclusions are valid but obvious. Concluding that most accomplishments are relatively recent is one example. Another is the dominance of recent Western civilization in producing human accomplishments. Some of Murray's conclusions regarding the genesis of accomplishments fall into this category of valid but obvious. He concludes that cosmopolitan cities and freer societies foster creativity. You don't need to count column inches in encyclopedias to know this. A theory or method that labors to produce obvious results is not likely to be powerful.
What about novel claims? Murray makes one interesting and unexpected claim; that the rate of significant accomplishments has been declining since about 1850. This is surprising in view of the huge advances in science and technology in the past century and a half. This claim is based on adjusting achievements, measured primarily as significant figures, for population size. When Murray makes this adjustment, which he correctly restricts to Western societies, he notes a decline in the rate of accomplishment. This is a dubious claim. As described above, the science and technology lists underestimate significant figures and most of these uncounted figures occur after 1850. Murray's lists fail completely to capture the diversification of creative activities that occurs after 1850. For example, the important effort to recover and understand the human past is largely a phenomenon of the past 150 years. Important scientific fields such as cosmology, climatology, ecology, population genetics, epidemiology, and materials science are largely 20th century products. Economics as a scientific discipline, most of the social sciences, and psychology begin in the second half of the 19th century.
Another problem is that rate is a ratio and changes in any ratio can reflect changes in the numerator, the denominator, or a combination of both. Before 1850, we are dealing with preindustrial societies, after 1850, industrialization accelerates all over Western Europe and North America. Is it correct to compare relatively simple preindustrial societies with the much more differentiated world that results from industrialization? A simpler measure like cumulative achievements is probably more robust. Murray makes an unsuccessful effort to deal with the changing nature of society. He introduces a correction for 'de facto' population, an estimate of individuals who could have contributed in a significant way. His 'de facto' measure, however, doesn't take into account the accumulation of knowledge in the sciences and the increasing need for education in order to make substantial contributions. The 'de facto' measure leads to a marked over-estimation of the actual population that can make significant contributions to science and technology.
Murray has no analysis of the past 50 years; he simply assumes that trends from 1850 to 1950 continue over the last 50 years. This is methodologically dubious and very likely to be wrong. The past 50 years has been a hyper-Golden Age for science and technology development. This remarkable recent efflorescence of science and technology has occurred in the context of modest total population increases in the Western world. It is associated with significant increases in the availability of higher education but the increase in scientific and technological accomplishment greatly outstrips the increase in total population, the increase in literate population, and the increase in university educated population by huge factors. This is not the picture of decline, it is the picture of a tremendously high recent rate of achievement.
Murray's analysis is largely sterile. His valid conclusions are largely conventional and uninteresting, and his interesting conclusions are invalid. The greatest effect of this book may be to stimulate scholars to do a better job on this interesting topic.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant but controversial.
Review: This is the first attempt to quantify the accomplishment of individuals and countries worldwide in the fields of arts and sciences by calculating the amount of space allocated to them in reference works. This is quite an achievement, as the writing no doubt requires a lot of reading, analyses, and work.Although the book is very instructive, I have problems with the methodology used. It is very difficult to compare Shakespeare to another writer like Homer, or Voltaire and Rousseau, as they were from different times and wrote about different topics, some in verses others in prose. It is even more difficult to compare the achievements of Newton to those of Galileo, Faraday, Laplace or Euclid. It would be difficult to make the assertion that Pasteur or Fleming are more or less influential than inventors in other fields. It is also difficult to compare Chinese achievements to those of the Europeans for two simple reasons: 1) western inventions are well publicized in the English literature while eastern works are rarely translated into English, 2) westerners are more dynamic and outgoing than their Chinese counterparts who in the last two millenia are more interested in moral issues than sciences. It should be noted that for many centuries, the Chinese have made tremendous advances in sciences and arts (gunpowder, ink, wheel, and so on) only to suddenly decide to achieve moral perfection rather than pursuing scientific achievements. The world would have been different had they not changed their minds. I have learned a lot from the author: his work gives me a visual and global assessment, although somewhat biased, of the achievements of the giants in history. It is also one of the most original and probably controversial books I have ever read. It will certainly cause a lot of ink to flow; therefore, it will have its own place in history.
Rating: 
Summary: quick ? for "Neglects Cambodians!"
Review: This made me very curious to learn more about that Cambodian survey of human accomplishment from 1100AD.
Of the 1,200 or so Sanskrit or Khmer inscriptions discovered around Angkor, aside from ritual instructions and listings of assets, only 3 contain preserved pieces of literature ... or so I thought??
Rating:
Summary: Excellence - when, who, why
Review: This was not what I expected. I had anticipated a more leisurely discussion of art history, the story of science, etc on the order of Daniel Boorstin or Fernandez-Armesto. Instead, we're presented with a detailed explanation of the methodology used to determine human achievements and achievers. (The mathematical/statistical discussions should have been placed in an appendix but then they would never have been read.)
Murray maintains that human achievement is based on excellence and that the best measure of achievement is by studying what experts in those fields say. He takes scholarly works and uses statistical analysis based on preponderence of mention to derive a Top XXX List for several categories in the arts and sciences. He offers separate lists for non-Western cultures where we would be comparing apples and oranges (literature, art, philosophy).
Not only does he attempt to identify what human achievement is he is also concerned with answering the why. He spends an inordinate amount of time on the issue of women and minorities. (The vast majority of those listed are European, male and white.) The story of the Ahskenazi Jews and their over-representation vs women and their under representation is a jewel. He even examines documents from works with the stated goal of emphasizing non-Europeans and finds almost exactly the same correlation of "great" events and people.
Especially intriguing were his twelve meta-inventions, tools or observations (artistic realism, polyphony, logic, the scientific method) that changed "everything". There are so many astute observations - artists are expendable and replaceable, scientists are not - the idea of purpose and individuality was a factor - the way individuals saw themselves under Eastern and Western philosophy - the role of war and peace - IQ levels among groups - genetic differences between the sexes - how very limited the area and populations were for achievement.
His thoughts on the sheer, sustained intellectual effort required for achievement should be mandatory reading. People instinctively recognize excellence which explains why "rap", "performance art" and cartoons are not held in the same esteem as a Bach cantata, an Ibsen play or WAR & PEACE. They do not require the skill, study or hours of practice associated with greatness. He ends on a disquieting note with the observation that human achievement is declining. This is a must read for all interested in our species and its possibilities.
Rating:
Summary: Wow.
Review: What an excellent book. Charles Murray is a wonderfully clear and gripping writer, regardless of whether he is giving a brief overview of human advancement from 800 B.C. to the modern age or explaining the more tedious aspects of his method for sifting through the histories to find the essential artistic and scientific elite. While the overwhelming majority of these are men, he takes feminist concerns seriously and goes to great lengths to present both social and biological explanations for the underrepresentation of women. He also discusses the acheivements of other cultures with fair-mindedness, pointing out where, when and in what way other civlizations surpassed our own while unflinchingly exploring the reasons behind the overwhelming dominance of Westerners in the arts and sciences from 1400 on. To accuse him, as some will, of chauvinism and ethnocentricism is grossly unfair, as any open-minded person who reads this book must concede. Truly, this is an excellent and important work which lives up to its incredible ambition. Buy it now.
Rating:
Summary: HOW TO CONVINCE STUPID PEOPLE THEIR SMART!
Review: Write a book and tell them--hey, white people, youre smarter than everyone else! Look at all your books. Hey, here's another one!
Murray regales us with tales of the "excellence" of Western Christian culture. Too bad he stops at 1950. Maybe because the body count of corpses spawned by Euro-excellence by mid-20th Century made his regression analysis short circuit. Who knows?! Excellent work, Perfesser!!!!
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