Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty

The recording opens with a clip from later in the conversation, in which Murray says he had become convinced that Christian religiosity was extremely important to Western civilization and had started to doubt that secular humanism had the staying power it needs. The host then asks listeners to share the interview, subscribe on YouTube and leave an iTunes review, noting that this is a new and small podcast.

Asked what motivated Human Accomplishment, Murray says he often wondered that himself while writing it, because it was an extremely hard book to write. The seed was a mid-1980s book by Daniel Boorstin (transcribed as “porsten”), The Discoverers, which he expected to be a panorama of human accomplishment across the centuries. It turned out to be a set of biographies of major scientists and others. Nothing was wrong with that, he says, but it was not what he wanted to read.

As with his other books, Murray had a book he wanted to read and the way to get it was to write it. The task took five years and was very intense. The host asks how one person integrates every domain of human knowledge into one book, and Murray says he does not work the way many authors do, who map out chapters in advance, research, and then write.

Murray could not begin writing until he had done a great deal of historiometric research. He built inventories of events and of people in the arts and sciences using a long-established technique: go to the index of a reference book and count how many pages mention each person. The logic is that a history of music will spend far more space on Beethoven than on Prokofiev, because explaining Beethoven’s music takes more room and he looms larger in the story. Science works the same way, with Einstein getting a lot of space.

He compiled something like sixteen or eighteen separate inventories, including Western literature, Indian literature, Indian philosophy and Chinese art. He spent roughly two years doing almost nothing but going through book indexes and recording the data. One example is the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, a set he describes as meant to be the definitive catalog of important scientists. Working through that one source took 17 ten-hour days at the Hood College library, about 20 miles from his home.

Once the data existed, his writing was idiosyncratic: he follows whatever aspect interests him, digs in, writes, and moves on. He says his wife observed that for a few shining moments while finishing the book he knew everything, and then he began forgetting it, so that rereading passages now surprises him. He compares his method to a sculptor’s account of carving a horse.

you have this block of wood and you cut away everything that isn't a horse

Murray applies this to books: he holds a vague idea of what the book ought to look like and cuts away whatever does not match it.

Murray wrote mostly one chapter at a time, because each led to the next. Having decided to use the historiometric method, he realized he had to show readers what the distributions of accomplishment look like. That led him to what the transcript renders as the “latke curve” (apparently the Lotka curve). Great accomplishment does not follow a bell curve but a very left-skewed one. His example is professional golf: many players win one tournament, the number who win two plunges, those with three are near the bottom, and the greats stand alone at the end. He says this holds in almost every field of human excellence and that it was new to him when he began the book.

The host adds that what struck him about the chapter is that the inputs, such as individual wins, were themselves bell curves, yet the outcome was the Lotka curve.

The host raises the annus mirabilis: Einstein’s 1905, with special relativity, Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, and Newton’s plague-isolation year covering optics, gravity, motion and calculus. Murray offers several partial explanations. If you are in a very productive phase of life, the productivity spills over. For mathematicians that phase may be the 20s, and many great mathematicians did everything important by age 26, because work at the frontier needs every neuron firing at full force.

Social science and policy are different. Murray says you need fewer brain cells to be a decent social scientist than a mathematician, and judgment and experience help in history and public policy while being no help to a mathematician. He says he was clearly doing his best work in his 40s, a combination of youth and experience, while declining to compare himself with Newton. That fits findings on age distributions, and a miraculous year in one’s 70s is very unlikely.

A second factor is that the work done in such years can feed on itself: for Newton and Einstein, the different projects interacted, so a person at peak powers working on one important thing may be led to another. Murray adds that some of it remains mysterious, in that these things sometimes come out of nowhere.

Asked whether great achievers share habits, Murray says they are all over the lot in personality. The idea that very high IQ makes people odd and socially awkward is, in his view, an illusion: we notice brilliant oddballs and fail to notice brilliant people who are not odd. In music he contrasts Beethoven, tied with Mozart in his inventory and acting as if he were “god's gift to the world,” with Bach, ranked third by his count.

Murray says Beethoven was justified in his self-regard, but he set a template of the artist who has no time for ordinary people, and everyone afterward thought that was how one should act. Bach was a stable German family man who wrote a cantata every week for his church, fathered something like 22 children, and looked like a prosperous middle-class burgher. Some listeners, Murray notes, say Bach should be ranked first.

there is no such thing as the person who was really great in their field who sort of did it with their left hand

Hard work is the common theme. Other historians of genius have noticed the same thing: incredibly hard work over very long periods, whole lives, six or seven days a week. Murray includes Mozart, who has a reputation for tossing off pieces while writing one and playing another, but who also worked fanatically hard.

The host adds examples of variety, Trollope writing 2,500 words each morning versus an eccentric old-age Tolstoy, and notes that Feynman is often portrayed as playful and driven by curiosity, though his life shows much hard work and tedium. He asks why the narrative favors innate skill over effort. Murray asks for a concrete example of someone who did it that way, because everyone who comes to his mind worked really hard.

Murray calls the value of hard work one of the most underrated things today. He is struck, he says, by interviewers at the American Enterprise Institute and elsewhere who report that young candidates are worried about vacation days and whether they will be asked to work late.

what do you want a balanced life for

His answer, which he says he takes up in the curmudgeon’s guide, is that one’s twenties are the time to go flat out in pursuit of what one loves and to find out what that is, rather than to seek balance.

Murray cites the biologist E. O. Wilson: to be a top scientist rather than a merely good one, you spend 40 hours a week on teaching and ordinary university duties, then another 15 hours on one thing and another 15 on another, until Wilson has outlined basically an 80-hour week. Wilson calls this basic: you will not get there from here unless you are willing to do it.

the people who drives to the top work their asses off and hardly anybody does

Murray says this matches his own experience.