If two features define contemporary capitalism, they are first the tendency of each individual to increasingly bear alone the risks associated with living in a market society, and second the enmeshment of individuals in a totalizing system of surveillance constructed from our proliferating personal data. Two remarkable recent books demonstrate that these apparently novel features of 21st-century capitalism in fact have deep historical roots, and that their histories are intertwined in consequential ways.
But not only do these histories intertwine, they also inform each other, inviting the reader to consider what it means to be an “individual” in contemporary financialized capitalism. Dan Bouk’s engrossing history of the life insurance industry examines professional risk makers’ growing reliance on numbers (particularly as encoded in statistics) to narrate individual lives, rendering individual experience with ever greater precision. In Bouk’s telling, the rise of the actuary in the making and marketing of risk seems to move us closer to actually knowing the individual as a unique person—the “statistical individual”—if only to more closely calibrate contributions to insurance risk pools. Lauer’s captivating history of credit reporting appears to tell the opposite story, as quantitative techniques used to price risk in credit markets increasingly lift the individual from her particular circumstances, resulting in a disembodied, abstract self that Lauer describes as one’s “financial identity.”
Sorting out the discrepancies between these two accounts is not only of historical interest, because these two versions of the individual compete in accounts of contemporary society in the digital age: Do algorithms render us more transparent—and therefore known as singular individuals—to the systems that collect and process our personal data, or do they dissolve our individuality in ways that violate human subjectivity and personhood? I will argue in this essay that developments in insurance and credit markets over the last century raise the question of whether persons can (or should) be known as unique individuals by systems of risk pricing. I will suggest that the history of risk pricing in life insurance and consumer credit scoring reveals the quest to apprehend the individual qua individual, but that the object of this quest remains elusive. In fact, the elusiveness of the person may be a constitutive feature of financial capitalism.