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How Our Days Became Numbered - Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Paperback)
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How Our Days Became Numbered - Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Paperback)
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Long before the age of "Big Data" or the rise of today's
"self-quantifiers," American capitalism embraced "risk"--and
proceeded to number our days. Life insurers led the way, developing
numerical practices for measuring individuals and groups,
predicting their fates, and intervening in their futures. Emanating
from the gilded boardrooms of Lower Manhattan and making their way
into drawing rooms and tenement apartments across the nation, these
practices soon came to change the futures they purported to divine.
How Our Days Became Numbered tells a story of corporate culture
remaking American culture--a story of intellectuals and
professionals in and around insurance companies who reimagined
Americans' lives through numbers and taught ordinary Americans to
do the same. Making individuals statistical did not happen easily.
Legislative battles raged over the propriety of discriminating by
race or of smoothing away the effects of capitalism's fluctuations
on individuals. Meanwhile, debates within companies set doctors
against actuaries and agents, resulting in elaborate, secretive
systems of surveillance and calculation. Dan Bouk reveals how, in a
little over half a century, insurers laid the groundwork for the
much-quantified, risk-infused world that we live in today. To
understand how the financial world shapes modern bodies, how risk
assessments can perpetuate inequalities of race or sex, and how the
quantification and claims of risk on each of us continue to grow,
we must take seriously the history of those who view our lives as a
series of probabilities to be managed.
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