This book is about the uses of “big data” in the rapidly expanding insurance industry a century ago in the United States. Appropriately, the author is a member of the working group Historicizing Big Data at the Max Planck Institute. The big data from a century ago is an insurance company’s collection of information about individual applicants that was used to decide who should receive a policy and at what price. The detailed information, which often included standardized medical and credit reports, was stored in summary form on individual file cards. This process, according to Bouk, gave rise to the “statistical individual”—a construct much in evidence today.1
Bouk based his study on the archive records of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America and the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, as well as the papers of individuals who were central to the big-data enterprise in the insurance...