Automating Inequality, by Virginia Eubanks

The amount of personal information floating around in the electronic world is staggering.  In Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, Virginia Eubanks argues that we have created an electronic poor house, with "automated decision-making systems [which] shatter the social safety net, criminalize the poor, intensify discrimination, and compromise our deepest national values."  Lest her readers think this only applies to the poor and not their own educated, middle-class selves, she adds, "systems first designed for the poor will eventually be used on everyone."

Eubanks, a political science professor, examines a few very specific systems used in agencies which serve the poor: an Indiana program which sorts data for welfare eligibility, a Los Angeles program which identifies homeless clients for housing programs and services, and a Pittsburgh program for child and family services.  Each has been touted as improving efficiency, reducing fraud, and reducing waste.

Eubanks isn't much of a fan of any of these programs, or others like them.  A big, obvious problem is the possibility that "all that data is being held for other purposes entirely: to surveil and criminalize" the poor.  In some instances, law enforcement has accessed data from these systems to track people down and run sting operations.  In others, officials extrapolate data to anticipate issues and preemptively intervene in family's lives.  Eubanks calls this "poverty profiling."

For Eubanks, the root problem is that these systems don't address the root problems of poverty.  They reveal a historical pattern in which "during times of economic hardship, America's elite threw the poor under the bus."  It continues today, but now "they are handing the keys to alleviating poverty over to a robotic driver."  Her solution would be to dismantle the electronic data and surveillance systems and establish the universal basic income, which is simply a cash transfer program.  As socialistic as this sounds, her argument is certainly sound, and by reducing or eliminating welfare bureaucracies it could conceivably work.  Wouldn't you rather a few thousand of your federal government's dollars go to a needy family rather than a electronic data tracking system?

Eubanks offers terrific insight from her extensive observations in these three programs.  It's downright scary to see how much of our information is mined for use by government agencies.  The Pittsburgh program identifying potential future child abusers is particularly troubling.  Automating Inequality is an important read for people concerned about the future of government services for the poor as well as the future (and present!) of government surveillance of individual Americans.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!