Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute.

The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources.

WINNER: The 2019 Lillian Smith Book Award, 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social JusticeĪstra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: 'The single most important book about technology you will read this year.'ĭorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: 'A must-read.'Ī powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination―and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity

Automating inequality