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

Please bear with me for three or four sentences while I make a well-written book sound dense and slow. Dan Bouk’s How Our Days Became Numbered is genealogical in a Foucauldian sense. We are who we are as individuals by virtue of supra-individual phenomena such as race, gender, class, language, nation, religion, ability, and so on. We become types of individuals through these social categories. Because those phenomena constitute us, they are easy to take for granted. Bouk points out how late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Americans created a new individuality, specifically “a statistical individual” (xviii), which his book renders newly strange. The book does all this complex intellectual work in fine prose worthy of long-form nonfiction publications like Harper’s or The New Yorker. The preface and epilogue are especially notable, where Bouk effectively steps onstage himself, explaining how he came to his topic in a way that helps humanize a subject matter that can seem remote and abstract.

The book’s first half follows the growth of the life insurance industry, with each chapter focusing on a particular technique used in the making of statistical individuals: gathering groups into shared qualities, identifying which qualities a specific person had, blurring the particulars of individuals through aggregates and averages, and using data from the past to predict and eventually control the future. Bouk sets these developments against the backdrop of external crises. For example, market turbulence in the 1870s helped push the industry away from medical examination and toward statistical aggregation. This means the epistemic anchor of insurance became the abstract, collective body of a population examined by actuaries instead of the physical body of an insured person examined by physicians. Financial crises also drove insurers to diversify their risk pools, expanding their customer base beyond northern middle-class white men. In doing so, Bouk underscores, insurers enrolled people into novel ways of understanding the relationships between self and society, and between past, present, and future. Readers learn as well about how the lavishness of insurance executives’ lives and the political power of insurance companies became the subject of congressional investigations and public outrage in 1905. The book’s second half looks at the industry’s growing cultural influence as it sought to regain lost legitimacy. In the process, the industry shifted from seeing its purpose as securing against unforeseen events to intervening in people’s lives based on statistical data: actively shaping the future.

External factors like financial and political crises intersected with internal factors, above all the tensions built into insurance practices as modes of thought. Was the goal of insurance social responsibility or profit-making? Was it sharing wealth and protecting the vulnerable, or hording wealth and rewarding the virtuous (read: powerful and lucky)? And what were the best ways to number Americans’ days? Insurers’ changing answers defined the meaning that external context had within the industry. Furthermore, over time insurers’ answers came to shape the culture and modes of selfhood in U.S. society more generally. This is part of why the details inside—I would call this the business history facet of the story—matters for the generalizations, or what I would call the history of capitalism facet of the story. Bouk finds within the firm the specifics of the creation of a new form of individuality that flowed outward into the rest of society.

Bouk examines these changes as the result of insurers’ “statistical assembly lines” (xxix) and “risk assembly lines” (xxv). Bouk gives sustained attention to the individual lives of some of the people who built, owned, and operated those assembly lines of abstraction. Among them, unsurprisingly, are insurance company presidents such as Thomas Lambert and statisticians such as Frederick Hoffman and Louis Dublin, and some more surprising people such as the novelist Richard Wright and the composer Charles Ives. Bouk’s...