How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual

Bouk, Dan

ISBN 10: 022625917X / ISBN 13: 9780226259178

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2015

About this Item

1st Printing. This copy is Good; the text is clear, bright, but with small marks in the margins of about 15 of the book's 294 pages; binding is tight. First edition, unstated but earliest appearance of book. Stated 1st Printing. The jacket is Like New, intact, including color and design. We have a five star rating because of our fulfilment success and because our descriptions are accurate. All shipments within the U.S. sent with Tracking. On foreign sales, because of the heavy weight of this book, we have to charge extra for shipping: however, we will only charge the difference between our regular shipping rate and the extra charge that the U.S.Post Office asks to ship the book. We guarantee: NO NASTY SURPRISES.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022625917X
• ISBN 13: 9780226259178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Like New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Dan Bouk is assistant professor of history at Colgate University and a member of the Historicizing Big Data working group at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science.