Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 is a book published in 2003 by Charles Murray, most widely known as the co-author of The Bell Curve. It surveyed outstanding contributions to the arts and sciences from ancient times to the mid-twentieth century. The book attempts to quantify and explain human accomplishment worldwide in the fields of arts and sciences by calculating the amount of space allocated to them in reference works, an area of research sometimes referred to as historiometry.

Murray ranks the leading 4,000 innovators in several fields of human accomplishment from 800 BC to 1950. In each field Murray identifies a number of sources (leading encyclopedias, histories and surveys) providing information about the leading figures in the field. The rankings are made from information in these sources. A raw score is determined based on how many sources mention and on how much space in each source is devoted to a person. Then these raw scores are normalized so that the lowest score is 1 and the highest score is 100. The resulting scores are called "Index Scores".
The categories of human accomplishment where significant figures are ranked in the book are as follows: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physics, Mathematics, Medicine, Technology, Combined Sciences, Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Western Philosophy, Western Music, Chinese Painting, Japanese Art, Western Art, Arabic Literature, Chinese Literature, Indian Literature, Japanese Literature, and Western Literature. The omission of several relative categories, including a broader Chinese art category or an Indian art category, are due to a lack of identifiable figures as most of the work is anonymous.

"What the human species is today," he says, "it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the north-western Eurasian land mass."

Unfortunately, there is a sting in the tail. In the 20th century, Western societies lost their religious convictions while equality and inclusion replaced the pursuit of excellence as the highest social goal. The result: nihilism, relativism, Toni Morrison and "unreadable" literature such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. "The 20th century tipped over into a kind of sterility. Finnegans Wake will become a curiosity, like atonality in music."

Instead of the vibrant vision of a Dante, readers got the bleak absurdities of the likes of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and even Woody Allen, all utterly depressed by the meaninglessness of life. For a nihilist, says Murray, producing great work is "just harder"..