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Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor Kindle Edition

by Virginia Eubanks (Author)

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Naomi Klein: "This book is downright scary."

Ethan Zuckerman, MIT: "Should be required reading."

Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read for everyone concerned about modern tools of inequality in America."

Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "This is the single most important book about technology you will read this year."

A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination—and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity

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. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

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. 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.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. 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. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

Length: 265 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Product details

File Size: 4729 KB
Print Length: 265 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1250074312
Publisher: St. Martin's Press (January 23, 2018)
Publication Date: January 23, 2018
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B0739MF8VF
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

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Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #102,665 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #16 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > Social Services & Welfare
- #31 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Poverty
- #31 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Computers & Technology > Tech Culture & Computer Literacy > Social Aspects

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danah boyd

Eyeopening, mindbending, and utterly beautiful

January 23, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

“Automating Inequality” is the rare book that manages to offer extensively researched and tremendously insightful information in a page-turner. Drawing on the voices of those who work in social services - and those who leverage those services - this book details how algorithmic technologies are upending basic government programs supporting the unhoused in accessing shelter, providing access to welfare, and managing child services programs. Eubanks offers historical context about the role of the poorhouse in earlier American societies to explain how, through technology, we’ve built a digital poorhouse that is just as abusive and stigmatizing. This is a critical read for anyone who is trying to understand poverty in America and why well-intended technology is only going to be used to exacerbate existing social inequities. “Automating Inequality” is ethnography at its best, on par with Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” or Matt Desmond’s “Evicted.” I cannot rave loudly enough about the awesomeness of this book.

24 people found this helpful

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Frank.Bannister@tcd.ie

but she never demonstrates adequately how technology is central to the problems the poor now face - something one would think would not ...

May 6, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

My reaction to this book is the same as that of another 3 star reviewer (James) in that, while this is an interesting read, it is not primarily about automating equality., it is first and foremost about poverty and cultural attitudes to poverty and inequality.

The book opens promisingly with a story about her and her partner's personal nightmare when their health insurance company's computer decided that a perfectly legitimate claim that they made was might be fraudulent. I expected this theme to continue, but instead the technology is subsequently shunted into a supporting role in a much wider tract of advocacy on behalf of the disadvantaged. It is not that I disagree with much of what the author says, but she never demonstrates adequately how technology is central to the problems the poor now face - something one would think would not be that hard to do. Maybe her knowledge of technology is limited, but I was hoping for more about the problems of asking computers to make highly complex social decisions.

Instead we get a lot of politics and political history and three complicated, multi-dimensional case studies. The latter are well described, but as I said, whatever the reality, the computer systems come across as only bit players in the accounts the author provides. I guess that I was hoping for a version of Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" only applied to inequality, but what I got was something different.

5 people found this helpful

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M. Natasha Reid

This is what the system does not want you to know....

February 27, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

The information is compelling and the storytelling makes this book worthwhile. If you don't about the new poor and new rich, this shifts through some of the haze. Great read!

2 people found this helpful

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Critically important read!

February 25, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

An informed assessment of a critical issue. Read this book if you are interested in social justice issues. W

One person found this helpful

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C. CASTILLO Ocaranza

Read before creating your machine learning models

May 30, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

If you're a researcher or practitioner who wants to create new methods for evaluating risks, prioritizing benefits, or similar applications, read this first. It is a great analysis grounded on the study of three key cases in the US, but from which you can draw general conclusions and guidelines.

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Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky

Brilliant read!

March 28, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This insightful over view of poverty and the way algorithms shape modern society is a must read for anyone who wants a better understanding of how 21st Century America works.

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... technological "progress" may make the most vulnerable people even worse off.

March 5, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

An enraging but utterly necessary account of how technological "progress" may make the most vulnerable people even worse off.

One person found this helpful

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March 21, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Smart. Well-written. Engaging.

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Most recent customer reviews

doug kortyTop Contributor: Health & Wellness

There are better books

I have mixed feelings about this book, I am sympathetic to some of the ideas but I think it is off point in some ways.Read more

Published 1 month ago

Adam Shepard

Curious...

What about the high tech tools that are advocating for the poor? Why did she choose to avoid those?

Published 1 month ago

Gderf

High-tech tools punish the poor? Not substantiated here.

Unless the author thinks that welfare entitles recipients to equality with workers, this has little to do with inequality.Read more

Published 2 months ago

James

Interesting Read

While I enjoyed reading this book I would not describe it as a must or important read. The author's argument (i.e.Read more

Published 3 months ago

Stacey Sutton

Four Stars

This should be required reading for all user experience designers, as well as system, and application developers,

Published 3 months ago

David Walter

I ended up disappointed in this book

I ended up disappointed in this book. I felt the author was too glib, confusing assertions with proof.Read more

Published 4 months ago

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Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor Kindle Edition

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