Review by New York Times Review
upper-middle-class professionals love data. We tend to think that the smug, smart people who run companies like Google and Uber have some secret knowledge; we even give them our personal information, uneasily, but ultimately with a bit of a shrug. We're seduced by similar smug, smart, supposed innovators hawking data's potential to revolutionize health care and education. We assume technology and the information it yields is making everyone's life easier, freer and more comfortable. Virginia Eubanks begs to differ, with the authority to do so. For the poor, she argues, government data and its abuses have imposed a new regime of surveillance, profiling, punishment, containment and exclusion, which she evocatively calls the "digital poorhouse." While technology is often touted by researchers and policymakers as a way to deliver services to the poor more efficiently, Eubanks shows that more often, it worsens inequality. Data can't provide what poor people need, which is more resources. Indeed, as with the 19th-century poorhouse, she argues, the shiny new digital one allows us to "manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty." Although Eubanks is an activist and a political-science professor (at the University of Albany, SUNY), "Automating Inequality" is a work of investigative journalism. She travels to Indiana, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, conducting illuminating interviews with administrators, social services staff and, most powerfully, people unlucky enough to reside in the digital poorhouse. The book is dedicated to a severely disabled little girl named Sophie. At the age of 6, during Indiana's experiment with welfare eligibility automation, Sophie received a letter (addressed directly to her) informing her that she was losing her Medicaid benefits because of a "failure to cooperate" in establishing her eligibility for the program. This happened just as she was gaining weight, thanks to a lifesaving feeding tube, and learning to walk for the first time. Many Hoosiers lost vital assistance because of such computer "mistakes." In Pittsburgh, Eubanks meets Patrick and Angel. Though they are caring and vigilant parents to their own children, as well as generous volunteers helping other children in their community, this couple has been repeatedly flagged by social service databases for child neglect. It turns out, along with many other parents under suspicion by Pittsburgh child welfare authorities, their crime is being poor. In one instance, Patrick was investigated for "medical neglect" when he couldn't afford an antibiotic prescription for his daughter. In Los Angeles, Eubanks follows Gary Boatwright, 64, who lost his job processing subprime mortgages when that industry collapsed. The city uses an algorithm to determine which of the city's tens of thousands of homeless people will get housing. It helps favor the hardest cases (those struggling with substance abuse or mental illness) and the easiest (people likely to be homeless only for a short time). Boatwright, lacking job prospects or unmanageable addictions, has fallen permanently between these cracks and never seems to get help. He has been homeless on and off for a decade. Technology allows the government to harass and punish the poor, but Eubanks adeptly shows that what they need instead is help. Assistance may cost more than technology, at least in the short run, but as countries that are more generous with housing, cash and health care have learned, it's the only effective way to fight poverty, along with poverty's associated ills, from child abuse to drug addiction to homelessness. "Automating Inequality" is riveting (an accomplishment for a book on technology and policy). Its argument should be widely circulated, to poor people, social service workers and policymakers, but also throughout the professional classes. Everyone needs to understand that technology is no substitute for justice. ? LLZA FEATHERSTONE is the author, most recently, of "Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 6, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Recognizing the direct link between the poorhouses of U.S. history and contemporary automated systems that re-create poorhouse conditions, Eubanks (Digital Dead End, 2012) dives deeply into three examples. Indiana lawmakers signed a $1.3 billion dollar contract to privatize and automate welfare, in part to reduce the fraud and waste they believed rampant. The system divorced recipients from trained caseworkers and caused eligible people in genuine need to suffer the erroneous cancellation of benefits. Residents of L.A.'s Skid Row are matched with increasingly limited housing resources by an automated system. To be eligible, unhoused people must receive a score by volunteering their most intimate data: mental health, physical health, sexual-assault history, domestic-violence history, etc. In Pittsburgh, scores predict if children will experience abuse or neglect in the future, yet the system encodes cultural and racial biases. People who must use these automated systems learn to expect little and object less for fear of being marked noncompliant. Eubanks argues that automated systems separate people from resources, classify and criminalize people, and invade privacy and that these problems will affect everyone eventually, not just the poor. The book's final chapter offers strategies to dismantle the digital poorhouse.--Dziuban, Emily Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Using story after devastating story, -Eubanks (women's studies; Univ. at Albany, State Univ. of New York; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age) provides a tour of the algorithms, data mining practices, and predictive risk models that increasingly (and often arbitrarily) target poor and working-class Americans for scrutiny and punishment. Big data systems (often operated for profit by the private sector) are sold to local governments as neutral, efficient replacements for human decision-makers but have the effect of diverting services from and criminalizing the poor. Eubanks's advocacy for the Americans impacted by this trend is passionate and matched by incisive analysis and bolstered by impressive research. VERDICT An important contribution to the growing literature sounding the alarm on the consequences of automating social policy and the dangers of big data. Eubanks's writing is clear and approachable and her use of narrative will appeal to general readers while being -essential for policymakers and academics.-Rachel Bridgewater, Portland Community Coll. Lib., OR © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Algorithms, predictive models, regression analyses: all are tools for criminalizing the poor and immiserating the middle class.In 2015, Eubanks (Political Science/Univ. at Albany, SUNY; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, 2011, etc.) writes by way of scene-setting, a series of computer-generated decisions cast doubt on a medical claim she was filing, flagging it as potential fraud. It took significant time and effort to clear her name, and she was a person with the education and standing needed to confront the system. Most Americans are not so well-equipped, and all face the same system, which removes ordinary decisions from human decision-makers and puts them in the purview of machinesas well as algorithms and rules that are largely intended to maximize the profits of the increasingly privatized providers of social services and to deny those in need of precisely those services in the first place. All Americans, from the poor to the wealthy, are implicated in this system. "We have all always lived in the world we built for the poor," writes Eubanks, and thus should not be surprised when we are cast out when we become sick, disabled, elderly, or otherwise in need of the social safety net that so many politicians, at the national and state levels, are bent on removing. The author's examination of the technological system underlying this dismantling is sobering. By her account, there seems to be little rhyme or reason to how cities such as Los Angeles determine who receives public housing, but there does seem to be a rationale behind Indiana's propensity for losing welfare-related paperwork and thus denying "more than a million applications for food stamps, Medicaid, and cash benefits, a 54 percent increase compared to the three years prior to automation."Equal parts advocacy and analysisa welcome addition to the growing literature around the politics of welfare. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
