Article ID: CBB082253889

Babbage Among the Insurers: Big 19th-Century Data and the Public Interest (2018)

unapi

This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of the mortality table was ambiguous, being both a public and a private object: often computed from company records they could also be extrapolated from public projects such as the census, or clerical records. Life assurance more generally straddled the line between private enterprise and collective endeavour, though its advocates stressed the public interest in its success. Reforming actuaries such as Thomas Rowe Edmonds wanted the data on which mortality tables were based to be made publicly available, but faced resistance. Such resistance undermined insurers’ claims to be scientific in spirit and hindered Edmonds’s personal quest for a law of mortality. Edmonds pushed instead for an open actuarial science alongside fellow travellers at the Statistical Society of London, which was populated by statisticians such as William Farr (whose subsequent work, it is argued, was influenced by Edmonds) as well as by radical mathematicians such as Charles Babbage. The article explores Babbage’s little-known foray into the world of insurance, both as a budding actuary but also as a fierce critic of the industry. These debates over the construction, ownership, and accessibility of insurance datasets show that concern about the politics of big data did not begin in the 21st century.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB082253889/

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Authors & Contributors
Borgato, Maria Teresa
Bouk, Daniel B.
Aarden, Erik
Alborn, Timothy L.
Backouche, Isabelle
Busch, Lawrence
Journals
Bollettino di Storia delle Scienze Matematiche
Social History of Medicine
British Journal for the History of Science
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Histoire & Mesure
Historia Mathematica
Publishers
Oxford University Press
Bloomsbury
University of Chicago Press
Concepts
Statistics
Insurance
Actuarial science
Mortality
Life insurance
Probability and statistics
People
Lagrange, Joseph Louis
Alembert, Jean le Rond d'
Euler, Leonhard
Graunt, John
Hollerith, Herman
Laplace, Pierre Simon
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
21st century
17th century
20th century
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
United States
Germany
India
Ireland
France
Institutions
National Health Service (Great Britain)
World Health Organization (WHO)
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