Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty | The Lunar Society #10

Murray argues that great achievers range from staid family men like Bach to tempestuous figures like Beethoven, but virtually all share fanatical, lifelong effort—there are no true ‘left‑handed’ geniuses who merely dabble.

Using Lotka curves, Murray shows that a tiny number of people produce a disproportionate share of breakthroughs, and that many of them experience ‘annus mirabilis’ years when multiple major advances cluster at a peak period of life.

He emphasizes that societies that legitimize individual pursuit of passion and connect it to a higher purpose (as Thomistic Christianity did with understanding God’s creation) are more likely to generate sustained artistic and scientific excellence.

Murray questions whether purely rational, non‑theistic ethics can provide firm, durable grounds for absolute moral claims (e.g., that murder is always wrong) and worries that intellectuals already retreat from principles when they become unfashionable.

Drawing on Mancur Olson, he argues that proliferating entrenched interests and unkillable policies (like sugar subsidies), combined with derivative rather than frontier achievements, resemble late Roman decadence more than dynamic growth.