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

by Dan Bouk

How Our Days Became Numbered reveals how the insurance industry revolutionized how we view life. Explore how the rise of risk assessment shaped American society, from the boardrooms of Wall Street to everyday life. Uncover the history of how we became a society obsessed with quantifying and predicting our futures.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science

Hardcover

First published May 18, 2015

Reviews

[Sarah Hehrer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I knew how to read

[Paul Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would guess that this is an expansion of the author’s doctoral dissertation, as it is structured like one, with previews of the content of each chapter and frequent summations. I found the parts about the early development of life insurance underwriting to be the most interesting. This development is presented as beneficial in its influence on the development of public health concepts, but detrimental in its influence on dividing the population by race. Also, the ties between the early underwriters and eugenics were disturbing. An interesting book in places, but I found the overall theme of the statistical individual a little difficult to follow.

[James Zwierzynski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really cool historiography of the practice of quantification and measurement of individuals through the lens of life insurance. Never would I have expected that a history of the life insurance industry would be so engrossing -- I'm totally enamored with Bouk's unique writing style of narrativizing history through the lens of biographical elements of actors in writing this history. Bouk performs a careful analysis that balances social practice and elements of valuation with the history of science and considering the formation of epistemic objects that was really refreshing for a "capital H" History monograph.

[Saima Iqbal · Rating 3 out of 5]

appreciate the project — historicizing life insurance and thereby understanding its origins and impact — and the personality that shone thru the pages, but felt the writing lacked clarity, both on the sentence level and the chapter one. many of the technical details eluded me; the larger story the book was building up also felt incomplete. do better appreciate how life insurance shaped medicine / govt / external spheres, tho.

[Lars Tackmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read

The history of insurance is much more fascinating than one would expect from what is usually considered a dull subject. This is really the story about how data slowly came to rule our lives, how we went from tabulating deaths from gravestones to modern big data. Fascinating, easy to read and highly recommended

[David Spanagel · Rating 4 out of 5]

My undergraduate students seemed to find this book's historical argument easy to understand because of the storytelling narrative style Dan Bouk employs

[Jerrod · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a nice overview of the life insurance industry in America from the mid 1800s and mid 1900s. The narrative was, overall, well constructed, but the last chapter fell flat. There was too much summary and not enough new information. The construction of the chapter around the depression-era photograph was a bit contrived and distracting. My favorite part was the discussion about the interaction between life insurers and public health measures. This brings to light how incentives can arise for private institutions to pursue socially beneficial projects, especially when there is some amount of coordination within the industry. This part of the book was very informative and often entertaining. I would have liked more discussion of race politics surrounding the creation of risk categories. Given the variation of risk in the "white" category and given that life insurers (and insurers, generally) are seen to be profit seekers, I came away from the book not really knowing why insurers did not further disaggregate this category in its constituent parts (Irish, Italian, etc.). To put this another way, why was there not more minute price discrimination (in the economic sense)? This is a good book for anyone wanting to know about life insurance during this time period, but I would recommend not reading the last chapter. The reader will also learn a lot about data collection (e.g. via networks of local lawyers acting as industry spies) and storage... not as boring as you might think.

[Eric Pecile · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well put together narrative about the development of the insurance society in the United States. Effectively highlights the statistical factors that the numeric individual became subject to in his quest to establish a financial safety net .