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

by Virginia Eubanks

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Virginia Eubanks investigates three case studies of automated decision systems targeting the poor: Indiana's automated welfare eligibility system, a coordinated entry system for homeless services in Los Angeles, and a predictive model for child abuse in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. She reveals how these digital tools create a modern poorhouse that intensifies surveillance and punishment of vulnerable populations under a veneer of technological neutrality.

Published:: 2018
Pages:: 260

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor references 4 other books.

It draws on The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Thinking in Systems and Nudge.

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What This Book Draws On

The books Eubanks references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Eubanks explicitly extends Alexander's The New Jim Crow framework to the digital realm, arguing that automated systems create a digital poorhouse analogous to the mass incarceration system Alexander documented for racial minorities

References

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander

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Draws on Meadows's Thinking in Systems framework to analyze how automated eligibility systems create reinforcing feedback loops that trap families in poverty through cascading denials of services

References

Thinking in Systems

by Donella Meadows

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Critiques the libertarian paternalism framework from Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge, arguing that when nudge-style choice architecture is embedded in welfare algorithms, it becomes coercive surveillance rather than gentle guidance

References

Nudge

by Richard Thaler

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References Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow research on automation bias to show how caseworkers defer to algorithmic risk scores even when their own professional judgement suggests different conclusions

References

Thinking, Fast and Slow

by Daniel Kahneman

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Intellectual Lineage

How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.

Builds on (2 layers deep)

Directly cites

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incar...

Thinking in Systems

Nudge

Thinking, Fast and Slow

2 steps back

The Lessons of History

The Lucifer Effect

Predictably Irrational

The Black Swan

Stumbling on Happiness

The Wisdom of Crowds

Unexpected Connections

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