2025/01/21 by Barbara Kiviat · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Economic Theory and Institutions
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaf006
openalex publication_date 2025/01/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/13
In The Ordinal Society, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy take on a pressing topic—how social life has been upended by previously unimaginable amounts of data collection and computational know-how. This much-anticipated book, which builds on the authors’ influential earlier scholarship, offers a theoretically rich yet eminently readable look at our emerging world of data-driven governance. The story starts in Silicon Valley in the 1960s with the personal computing revolution that would ultimately lead to smartphones, social media feeds, and the Internet of Things. This technological advance went hand-in-hand with a libertarian ethos that justified the free flow of personal information that the Internet and subsequent devices captured, as well as the use of data to customize how people are treated. Yet as Fourcade and Healy show, behind the innovation and ideology, a more fundamental social process was taking root. The mass collection of digital data enabled organizations to classify, rank, and value individuals in novel ways and at unheard-of scale. This is the “ordinal” in the title of the book, a society built around measuring people and ordering them from best to worst.