An Economist Looks at Bach

The economist Tyler Cowen has a real interest in Bach and offers an evaluation from an unusual point of view: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time.  That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time.  I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation:

1. Quality of work.

2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.

3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.

4. Quantity of work.

5. Peaks.

6. Consistency of work and achievement.

And a few other parameters. He concludes:

I see Bach as ranking very, very high in all these categories.  Who else might even be a contender for greatest achiever of all time?  Shakespeare?  Maybe, but Bach seems to beat him for relentlessness and quantity (at a very high quality level).  Beethoven would be high on the list, but he doesn’t seem to quite match up to Bach in all of these categories.  Homer seems relevant, but we are not even sure who or what he was.  Archimedes?  Plato or Aristotle?  Who else?

Well in music, two possibilities would be Mozart and Schubert. Generally the obvious candidate, I would say, is Aristotle who dominated virtually every category of intellectual thought, from aesthetics, to ethics to politics to physics to logic, for roughly two thousand years. But in the arts? No, I suspect Bach has no real rival.