Industry Reviews
"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"
"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"
"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"
"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 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"
"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"
"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"
"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"
"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"
