How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual by Dan Bouk (review)

In How Our Days Became Numbered, Dan Bouk manages an extraordinary feat: he provides a history of life insurance that is riveting, and yes, even funny. With sparkling prose and keen insights, he examines the critical role the life insurance industry played in developing techniques of quantifying risk that have become central to contemporary life. Adding an important new dimension to the recent flurry of work on the history of insurance, risk, and capitalism, Bouk takes his readers inside the insurance corporations to understand how risk was constructed and debated as well as outside to examine moments of resistance and acquiescence. His story is at once about the development of new technologies for risk assessment and about the social meanings of these assessments. Bouk focuses on the unresolvable tensions between classing (individualizing risk) and smoothing (averaging risk), and between "reading fate" and "mastering fate." He is also always attentive to these practices' social implications. While there are a few lacunae—most notably its limited attention to gender—overall Bouk succeeds admirably, producing a nuanced history of life insurance that is a model of how to integrate the intellectual, cultural, social, and technical.

How Our Days Became Numbered opens in the years around the Panic of 1873. Using the entertaining story of Thomas Scott Lambert and his American Popular Life company as a starting point, Bouk introduces his readers to one of the book's central tensions: to what degree should risk assessments be individualized, as Lambert sought to do, and to what degree averaged based on little more than population mortality tables and age, as was the standard practice of the time? All insurance companies then (and now), Bouk demonstrates, engage in both practices, and there were (and still are) compelling arguments, both statistical and moral, for each. Although Lambert's unique form of classing perished with his company's bankruptcy and his own perjury conviction, the major U.S. insurers were already moving toward greater individuation in order to expand their consumer base.

Bouk then introduces his second central theme, the tension between fate and hope, prediction and change. Here he focuses on the African American community and its outrage at the higher insurance prices they faced. From the company perspective, this was not discrimination but equity: mortality tables demonstrated that African Americans died younger than white Americans, and so their premiums were higher. African Americans, however, argued that the data were flawed, drawn primarily from the era of slavery and thus irrelevant to post-Emancipation America. They contested the tables' fatalism with evidence of changed circumstances—fate had been altered. Ironically, although African Americans won the battle, as legislation in a number of states outlawed discriminatory pricing by race, they lost the war: major insurance companies, wedded to fatalism, mostly stopped insuring African Americans.

In subsequent chapters Bouk demonstrates how these two sets of tensions emerged again and again in different guises—from schemes to use medical examinations or physical characteristics to individualize risk classifications, to arguments over whether insurance companies should act to increase their policyholders' longevity through health interventions, to the emergence of the Social Security system to insure not against early death but extended life. He also illuminates beautifully how the avalanche of information insurers required to classify, keep track of, and extract payment from customers pushed the companies to develop new techniques for statistical reduction and better methods for storing and using the data acquired. Big data, the production of the statistical individual, and the making of risk into an everyday commodity for millions of Americans all have their origins, in part, in the story of insurance that Bouk so deftly provides.

There is no simple moral to the tale told in How Our Days Became Numbered, much to its credit. The technology of risk assessment discriminates but also socializes, exacerbating differences with one hand and creating new forms of commonality with the other...