Dan Bouk has added a valuable contribution to the recent windfall of monographs on the history of American life insurance, which includes Sharon Murphy's Investing in Life (2009), a comprehensive overview of the antebellum period, and JoAnne Yates's Structuring the Information Age (2005), which used that sector to examine the rise of information technology. How Our Days Became Numbered, which covers the period roughly from 1870 to 1940, is more akin to the latter book, in that it eschews a focus on the “business” side of things to dwell instead on episodes related to a broader theme: in this case, the companies’ efforts to convert their customers into “risks.” Indeed, a prior familiarity with Murphy's book, as well as Morton Keller's The Life Insurance Enterprise, 1885–1910 (1963), will be helpful for readers who wish to insert Bouk's fascinating account into a more conventional business history of life insurance.

Bouk devotes equal time to two distinct sectors of the market: “ordinary” offices, which focused on middle-class American breadwinners, and “industrial” offices that sold burial policies to the working poor. The book is organized by themes, which the author has arranged chronologically, moving from the Panic of 1873 (which resulted in the failure of dozens of firms) through antidiscrimination laws in the 1880s and 1890s that targeted industrial insurers; fin de siècle gatekeeping practices at “ordinary” companies; the inconveniently public airing of actuarial expertise at the 1905 Armstrong hearings; efforts by industrial insurers to tap into the life extension movement of the 1910s; and the commercial and wider political applications of Louis Dublin's Money Value of a Man (1930); as well as an encore chapter on racial discrimination in the 1930s, revealing close ties between insurance executives and the eugenics movement, and an epilogue on the New Deal. Although this organization makes for choppy reading at times, as different sets of companies and customers move into and out of the story, the chapters consistently move the reader through new and more sophisticated “numbering” technologies as they appeared over time. In the process, the chapters tell an engaging genealogy of “big data”: the “analytical, statistical gaze” deployed today by American corporations and government bureaucrats in roughly equal proportions (p. 210).

Bouk is at his best when he presents this story as a half-unwitting artifact of office politics. In the 1890s, for instance, when companies such as Mutual of New York (MONY) and New York Life achieved elephantine proportions, actuaries and doctors collaborated to develop gatekeeping methods that insured financial security without attracting too much attention from disgruntled customers or cost-conscious CEOs. Their solution involved a Medical Information Bureau, which traded clandestine underwriting data among member companies and which could also be used to discipline salesmen, detectives, and medical examiners who endorsed too many high risks. Its members were so successful at concealing their data-gathering methods from their employers that MONY's president “claimed to know very little” when asked by the Armstrong investigation about his staff's own generation of data (p. 92).

That investigation's legislative outcome, which tightly curtailed insurers’ executive excesses, also enabled actuaries and doctors to pull back the curtain on their quantifying ambitions and insert numbers directly into marketing strategies. An especially telling chapter reveals how Charles Ives, who headed MONY's New York agency, anticipated Dublin's Money Value of a Man in a pad-and-paper exercise for prospective policyholders, which inevitably resulted in a “money value” intended to convince male breadwinners that they were tragically underinsured. Also in this chapter, as well as in an examination of Metropolitan Life's earlier excursion into “life extension,” Bouk underscores the tensions between the profit-driven ambitions of corporate number-crunchers and the perfectionist goals of Progressive Era political reformers. Hence Dublin, who left MONY to become Metropolitan Life's head statistician, struggled to persuade other industrial insurers that it made sense to encourage annual medical checkups and invest in public-health reforms; he also created consternation among Progressives, who greeted his book with hard questions such as, What is the money value of a woman? This line of inquiry occasionally leads Bouk beyond a canon of acclaimed statisticians to outsiders like the Wharton student Lawrence Napoleon Brown, who recrunched Dublin's numbers in 1930 to demonstrate that Dublin's standard-setting assertion regarding subprime African American risks constituted racial discrimination for one simple reason: he had absorbed Irish and Southern insurers into the large numbers of white Americans, despite the fact that, on average, they predeceased people of color.

Bouk consistently presents this rich material with panache. He illustrates “risk making in transit” by reconstructing a conversation between Prudential and Metropolitan actuaries on an express train (p. 140). He presents his chapter on Ives—a composer as well as a sales manager—in four “movements.” His epilogue provides what is essentially an ingenious theorization of Capital One's “What's In Your Wallet?” advertising campaign. And he opens his book with a scene from James Cain's novel Double Indemnity in which a claims manager brandishes actuarial tables to prove that a suicide must have been a murder. (Bouk might have added, in keeping with his eye to office politics, that in the screenplay by Raymond Chandler the manager chastises his boss: “You never read an actuarial table in your life.”)

These spoonfuls of sugar make it easier to digest recurring, less-than-intuitive phrases such as “fatalization” (predicting the future based on the past), “white data politics” (statistics in the service of discrimination), and, most frequently, “risk making” (to belabor the fairly obvious point that risk is socially constructed). At times, also, Bouk's presentation of the Progressive Era as a big-data incubator obscures the signal regulatory accomplishments of that period, which Keller ably recorded. Especially in this present era of financial deregulation, it pays to remember that big data is not the only threat in town and is often in cahoots with unregulated corporate behemoths. Despite these drawbacks, however, 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.