How Our Days Became Numbered

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

by Dan Bouk

University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-25917-8 | Paper: 978-0-226-56486-9 | Electronic: 978-0-226-25920-8
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"How Our Days Became Numbered is a history of insurance, risk, and capitalism. Looking behind the veil at how private life insurance companies defined and priced 'life risks,' Bouk charts the deep philosophical questions, the inequalities and discrimination, the liberatory possibilities that intellectual pioneers struggled over as they built or fought the statistical infrastructure of risk. From the Panic of 1873 to the Great Depression, from life insurance to Social Security, Bouk charts the critical foundations of the world we live in today. Gripping, engaging, deeply human, and written with artistry and grace, Bouk's riveting history raises fundamental questions about corporate and state power in the reduction of individual human beings to a statistic, a risk--'the statistical individual' 'the statistical citizen'--and in the power those values have not just to predict the future, but to make it."

— Barbara Welke, University of Minnesota

"The history of quantification in life insurance seems like a heavy, serious topic. Bouk shows beautifully how funny it can be, and at the same time how disturbing. A well-ordered life span was needed for business purposes even more than for scientific ones, yet mortality could not easily be stabilized or reduced to an average. The brilliance of this book is in the linking of actuarial calculations of human longevity with themes of racial politics and discrimination that are so fundamental to American history."

— Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles

"How Our Days Became Numbered is an unsurpassed history of risk, statistics, and quantification in modern American life. Focused upon the power of American corporations to remake American culture and illustrating the ways in which ordinary Americans made sense of the numbering of their lives, Bouk has written a beautiful work of cultural and intellectual history."

— Jonathan Levy, Princeton University

"A key tension in modern liberal societies derives from the tendency of states, firms, and knowledge-makers to use statistical techniques to narrate individual experience. In this beautifully conceived and elegantly written book, Bouk explores this tension by examining how numbers make individuals into risks, following the key protagonists—actuaries, medical examiners, and peddlers of fate—as they sought to first forecast and then control American lives. An essential work in the burgeoning literatures on risk, numeracy, and the history of capitalism."

— Greta Krippner, University of Michigan

"Life insurers pondered the lives of ordinary people more than any other institution during the period of America's industrialisation. In this history, Bouk sees the emergence of 'numbered' lives, foreshadowing big data. . . . This fascinating history should teach us not to be fatalistic. Big data is what we choose to make it."

— New Scientist

"By the 1930s life insurance was woven so deeply into the nation's economic fabric that, when the Great Depression bit, many families were prepared to maintain their policies at almost any cost. . . . Much of Bouk's excellent work deals with the mathematical and actuarial engineering that insurers undertook between the two depressions to fortify their finances and expand their customer base."

— Financial Times

"Bouk’s excellent How Our Days Became Numbered takes us back to the terrain of insurance, where he explores the technologies and calculations that actuaries, executives, and doctors used to transform individuals into 'risks'. He shows most concretely how underlying differences in power and wealth became embedded in financial techniques and assumptions. Time and again, those at the top benefit from instability while the least enfranchised are left with nothing. Inequality looms in all these works, but in Bouk’s it constitutes and reconstitutes the architecture of finance itself."

— American Quarterly

"Bouk’s wonderful new book is a timely history of the roots of our contemporary situation. He explores how the American life insurance industry transitioned from its late-nineteenth century
aspirations of predicting fate to an early-twentieth century effort to master death. It is not only a
history of actuarial science, but also a cultural history of capitalism – and a surprisingly gripping
tale for an industry that many, preteens included, are liable to find dull. Bouk narrates the story
through a cast of characters who traipse through graveyards, assemble massive databases, and investigate corporate malfeasance. Statistics about life and death, he demonstrates, are anything but boring; rather, they are animated by and occasion moral debates about family, race, and the future of the nation."

— Journal of Cultural Economy

"Bouk, a modern US historian working within a relatively new field called the history of capitalism, offers a fresh perspective. In How Our Days Became Numbered, Bouk provides insight into the development of data-driven mechanisms in consumer finance."

— Science, Technology, & Human Values

"It is hard to write engagingly about insurance and the history of statistics. Bouk has succeeded in this feat.
Vivid, sometimes poetic prose, surprising examples, and memorable characters enliven the text. This is a very ambitious book."

— The American Historical Review

"An excellent study of the profound and lasting impact of risk making on people's lives."

— Choice

"Readers versed in statistical methods will find Bouk’s treatment of the Armstrong Investigation of 1905 into insurance practices interesting. The actuary Emory McClintock came under fire for his use of arcane smoothing methods, especially in determining income related to the distribution of dividends to policyholders. The smoothing methods pioneered by actuaries like McClintock and heavily criticized in the investigation have been refined and developed over the past 100 years to become a key tool in a statistician’s toolbox. Such discussions make How Our Days Became Numbered well worth the read."

— Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"How Our Days Became Numbered provides a subtle and illuminating history of the debates and practices of the executives, actuaries, and salespeople who confronted the growing prominence and complexity of their transforming profession."

— Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

"A valuable contribution to the recent windfall of monographs on the history of American life insurance....How Our Days Became Numbered provides a welcome and timely reminder of the treasure trove of politically relevant material that lurks in the archives of corporate America and of the insight that emerges when that record is mined by such capable hands."

— Business History Review

"The core of the book is Bouk’s fascinating chapter on the role of insurance in promoting a 'modern conception of death, which, paradoxically for an industry based on predicting death, suggested a flexible and negotiable relationship with the grim reaper. With the rapidly diverging life expectancies for rich and poor, our diet fads, and our fitness apps, we are clearly the inheritors of this concept."

— Journal of American History

"A fascinating account of how life insurers created statistical systems that measured the value of human life. pioneering work on the biological and scientific basis for Americans’ embrace of quantification and financial capitalism. Bouk has made a truly exciting contribution by underscoring the benefits of fusing the history of capitalism and social histories of science and professional expertise."

— Reviews in American History

"Drawing on the historiographical insights of Foucault (and others), Bouk demonstrates how the discipline of quantification simultaneously 'makes' and 'reflects' new social realities. . . . the work succeeds admirably at using the historical lens of life insurance to explicate the numbering of our days."

— Isis

"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 succeeds admirably, producing a nuanced history of life insurance that is a model of how to integrate the intellectual, cultural, social, and technical."

— John Carson, Technology and Culture

Preface: Strange Books

One. Classing - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0001
[Thomas Scott Lambert, American popular life, classing, smoothing, biometry, Mutual Life of New York, metropolitan, Panic of 1873, medical, actuarial]
This chapter explores the tension that existed in the late nineteenth century between life insurers’ efforts to class individuals into groups and their urge to smooth or average away individual difference. It focuses on the story of Thomas Scott Lambert and his company, American Popular Life, which emphasized the importance of medical classing over actuarial smoothing. The chapter explains Lambert’s business model, built around a medical analog to phrenology that he called biometry, and details the company’s collapse during the Panic of 1873 alongside many of its more conventional peers. It also considers how companies that survived the panic, including Mutual Life of New York and Metropolitan, decided to expand the reach of their companies and thus commodified and quantified many more Americans’ lives. Lambert’s trial for perjury frames the story. (pages 1 - 30)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Two. Fatalizing - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0002
[racial discrimination, African Americans, Julius Chappelle, T. McCants Stewart, Frederick L. Hoffman, rupture, statistics, fatalizing, anti-discrimination]
This chapter examines African Americans’ resistance (led by men like Julius Chappelle and T. McCants Stewart) to race-based discrimination by life insurers in the late-nineteenth century, which culminated in the successful passage in northern states of anti-discrimination laws. It interprets the debate over discrimination as partly a debate over whether statistics and insurers’ fatalizing assumptions (that the past can be used to predict the future) held sway for African Americans after the Civil War. The chapter shows how anti-discrimination thinkers focused on the war as a moment of rupture and pointed toward the hope of future equality. After northern states barred discrimination, many life insurers stopped soliciting African Americans. Frederick L. Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro emerged with life insurer support in this context. It also embraced the idea that the Civil War brought rupture, but this time the rupture pointed toward the extinction of free blacks. The chapter argues that this was one important example of a larger set of discussions taking place in the late-nineteenth century that challenged risk makers’ fatalizing assumption. (pages 31 - 54)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Three. Writing - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0003
[Medical Information Bureau, Brandreth Symonds, Charles B. Holmes, Oscar Rogers, observational communities, impairment, risk classes, doctors, lawyers, mercantile agencies]
This chapter argues that life insurers developed turn of the century systems for personalizing the making of risks as a way of preserving corporate correspondent networks. It follows the medical director Brandreth Symonds and the credit reporter Charles B. Holmes as they learned methods for centralizing and interpreting data about individual Americans. It explains how corporations like life insurers and credit agencies in the late nineteenth century built nation-spanning observational communities of professionals (doctors and lawyers) disciplined to meet corporate information needs. And it looks at the medical director Oscar Rogers and the actuary Emory McClintock in order to explain how the impairment, the Medical Information Bureau, and the study of risk classes emerged as answers to those unconvinced of the utility of risk-writing networks. (pages 55 - 88)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Four. Smoothing - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0004
[Emory McClintock, Charles Evans Hughes, deferred dividend, tontines, capitalism, smoothing, astronomy, banking, Armstrong, New York]
This chapter recounts the testimony of the actuary Emory McClintock before the New York State Armstrong investigation hearings of 1905 with an emphasis on McClintock’s explanations of how life insurers smoothed or averaged their data. Charles Evans Hughes examined McClintock sceptically and saw McClintock’s smoothing practices, especially when applied to corporate earnings, as a kind of corruption of capitalism. The chapter traces the origins of smoothing to developments in banking and astronomy, both of which influenced actuarial practice and convinced actuaries of the fundamental reality of life seen through the lens of smoothed, averaged data. It then contrasts Hughes’ idea that chance should be crucial to capitalism with McClintock’s and other risk makers’ ideal that individuals and corporations should be freed from fluctuations and chance through the risk-making process. Hughes and Armstrong committee eventually recommended doing away with the deferred dividend (or tontine) policies that stood at the center of the investigation and McClintock eventually suffered a medical breakdown from stress. But smoothing practices, the chapter argues, lived on. (pages 89 - 112)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Five. A Modern Conception of Death - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0005
[prediction, control, Frederick Hoffman, Irving Fisher, Louis Dublin, Life Extension Institute, preventive medicine, public health, medical screening, visiting nurse]
This chapter begins with Frederick Hoffman’s traditional, predictive risk making. It then considers how the disruption of the Armstrong investigations created an opportunity for reformers like Irving Fisher, Lee Frankel, and Louis Dublin to demonstrate how risk-making tools could be reappropriated for the purpose of extending lives. The chapter focuses on Irving Fisher’s idea of a “modern conception of death,” which held that the statistical regularities necessary for prediction should be understood to be mutable through human effort. The rest of the chapter considers this transition from prediction to control. Fisher used hypothetical life tables to make a case for significant public health expenditures and Dublin showed how an individual company’s statistical systems (Metropolitan’s) could be used to justify welfare programs, like medical exams or visiting nurse services, directed toward policyholders. Fisher then worked with Metropolitan and with life insurance medical examiners to found the Life Extension Institute, which played a key role in popularizing the regular medical screening and preventive medicine. The chapter closes with Frederick Hoffman’s unsuccessful efforts to convince Prudential to commit more energies to public health work, his transition toward preventive work, and the dismantling of his library. (pages 113 - 146)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Six. Valuing Lives, in Four Movements - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0006
[Alfred J. Lotka, Charles Ives, Louis Dublin, Oscar Rogers, numerical method, valuing, risk factors, Life Extension Institute, New York Life]
This chapter structures its narrative around a sales pitch written by the composer and insurance agent Charles Ives. Ives’ pitch used the science of traditional life insurance prediction to win over possible applicants and also tried to convince applicants that their financial and biological lives could be understood through probability. Most importantly, Ives explained his method in terms of offering a scientific method for valuing a life. In counterpoint to Ives’ pitch, the chapter offers two variations on the theme of valuing lives in 1920s America. One centers on Oscar Rogers and New-York Life’s championing of the numerical method for valuing individual lives in terms of risk factors. It explains the system, but also the doubts that actuaries and medical directors fostered about it, were it ever used outside of life insurance (as eventually occurred through the efforts of the Life Extension Institute). The second variation follows Louis Dublin and Alfred J. Lotka as they construct a means for valuing lives in dollars and debate the possibility of using those values to justify public health interventions. Eventually as their values became popular, the two men backed away from using them outside the context of valuing a man to his family. (pages 147 - 182)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Seven. Failing the Future - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0007
[biopolitics, racism, eugenics, data, substandard, subprime, African Americans, white, Lawrence Brown, Louis Dublin]
This chapter explains the biopolitics of life insurer data in the twentieth century. Looking into Louis Dublin’s use of life-span data to fight against immigration restriction and the racialization of eugenics, the chapter explains the “white data politics” of life insurance corporations that had worked over the prior decades to erase differences of nationality or region in order to create a unified “white” category. Lawrence Brown’s subversive reappropriation of Dublin’s data made clear that the most important implication of white data politics was the continuation of a risk-making system that discriminated against African Americans. The chapter explains how African Americans became the type for substandard or subprime life insurance contracts because of racism built into insurers’ classificatory systems. To illustrate the consequences of white data politics for ordinary Americans, the chapter opens and closes with the novelist Richard Wright’s experiences selling life insurance to poor blacks. (pages 183 - 208)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Conclusion: Numbering in Layers - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0008
[Dorothea Lange, tattoo, social security, Tom Cave, welfare state, New Deal, risks, life insurance]
This chapter draws three sets of conclusions from the book: first, that economic or political controversy created opportunities for the expansion of risk making; second, that the kinds of risks being made also expanded from purely vital risks to include economic risks too; and third, that risk makers generated with each of their expansions a proliferation of statistics, serial numbers, and databases tied to those being made into risks. The chapter uses Dorothea Lange’s photograph of Tom Cave and his social security number tattoo to work through these conclusions and to present a brief history of the migration of corporate risk-making methods from life insurance into the New Deal welfare state. (pages 209 - 236)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Epilogue: The Cards We Carry - Dan Bouk
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226259208.003.0009
[risk society, health insurance, credit cards, risk factors, genomics, screening, wallet]
This chapter begins by rifling through the post-war American’s wallet exploring the ways that risk-making systems now permeate modern life through health insurance, credit cards, and shopper loyalty cards, as well as through federal mortgage support, predictive policing, and airport security checks. It also discusses the new ways that risk makers promise to improve individual lives and bodies through risk factors, genomics, and preventative medical screenings. It further explains how this book presents a history of the tools that have led risk managers and critical sociologists to contemplate and describe a risk society. (pages 237 - 244)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index