"material achievements" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when referring to tangible accomplishments, such as high grades, awards or degrees. For example, "He has had many material achievements in his career, including several awards and a full scholarship to college."
On the other hand there are more positive expressions of admiration for the freedoms, the opportunities and the material achievements of a country unfettered by ancient traditions.
Her father was the sculptor Tony Smith, a close friend of Barnett Newman, and, rather like herself, an artist whose significance exceeds the sum of his material achievements.
Nobody can deny the country's huge material achievements, and individuals live far better and freer lives than they did under the Great Helmsman.
He did not approve of the culture of American capitalism, and, while he admired its material achievements, he was concerned that, for Americans, work had become a pathological obsession.
To claim that Jackie Kennedy's decision to marry Aristotle Onassis "signaled the end of the optimistic, liberal 1960's" or that " 'The Jeffersons' marked the crest of the civil rights movement, the summit of its material achievements and the beginning of the end of the integrationist ideal" is a kind of reductio ad absurdum itself.
She, on the other hand, is an estate agent and a gloss-painted worshipper at the altar of material achievement.
In addition, to compete in a globalized world, Mr. Mugabe's heirs will confront a pragmatic new environment abroad, in which ideology has long surrendered to material achievement.
("Every material achievement that would characterize civilization during the next two centuries began with the possibilities opened by the steam engine," he writes of James Watt's invention).
The reference to the still-roiling roast-the-rich movement, at least, makes a certain amount of sense, since "Godspell" celebrates the idea that the spiritual life is of paramount importance, and among the many parables enacted peppily before us are several reminding that an obsession with material achievement will land you on the wrong side of the fence at the day of judgment.
The introduction to a special issue of Politique africaine on 'Figures of success and political imaginaries' opens by stating that the figure of the functionary – salaried, state-employed and formally educated – has lost its value as an image of modern, urbane, social and material achievement (Banégas and Warnier 2001; see also Nyamnjoh 2005).
Bouncing around the stage tonight, a flame-haired dynamo, she unveils winning, frequently euphoric new material whose achievement is to sound exactly like clubbing feels.
