by Cathy O'Neil
the number of stops had risen by 600 percent: Ryan Devereaux, “Scrutiny Mounts as NYPD ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ Searches Hit Record High,” Guardian, February 14, 2012, www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/14/nypd-stop-frisk-record-high.
Homicides, which had reached 2,245 in 1990: David Goodman and Al Baker, “Murders in New York Drop to a Record Low, but Officers Aren’t Celebrating,” New York Times, December 31, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/nyregion/new-york-city-murders-fall-but-the-police-arent-celebrating.html.
an overwhelming majority of these encounters—about 85 percent: Jason Oberholtzer, “Stop-and-Frisk by the Numbers,” Forbes, July 17, 2012, www.forbes.com/sites/jasonoberholtzer/2012/07/17/stop-and-frisk-by-the-numbers/.
Only 0.1 percent, or one of one thousand stopped: Eric T. Schneiderman, “A Report on Arrests Arising from the New York City Police Department’s Stop-and-Frisk Practices,” New York State Office of the Attorney General, Civil Rights Bureau, November 2013, www.ag.ny.gov/pdfs/OAG_REPORT_ON_SQF_PRACTICES_NOV_2013.pdf.
The NYCLU sued the Bloomberg administration: “The Bronx Defenders Hails Today’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ Decision by Federal Judge Scheindlin,” Bronx Defenders, August 12, 2013, www.bronxdefenders.org/the-bronx-defenders-hails-todays-stop-and-frisk-decision-by-federal-judge-scheindlin/.
federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled: Ibid.
Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice: Adam Benforado, Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice (New York: Crown, 2015).
Privately run prisons: Peter Kerwin, “Study Finds Private Prisons Keep Inmates Longer, Without Reducing Future Crime,” University of Wisconsin-Madison News, June 10, 2015, http://news.wisc.edu/study-finds-private-prisons-keep-inmates-longer-without-reducing-future-crime/.
private prisons make profits only when running at high capacity: Julia Bowling, “Do Private Prison Contracts Fuel Mass Incarceration?,” Brennan Center for Justice Blog, September 20, 2013, www.brennancenter.org/blog/do-private-prison-contracts-fuel-mass-incarceration.
Michigan economics professor: Allison Schrager, “In America, Mass Incarceration Has Caused More Crime Than It’s Prevented,” Quartz, July 22, 2015, http://qz.com/458675/in-america-mass-incarceration-has-caused-more-crime-than-its-prevented/.
San Diego police used this facial recognition program: Timothy Williams, “Facial Recognition Software Moves from Overseas Wars to Local Police,” New York Times, August 12, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/us/facial-recognition-software-moves-from-overseas-wars-to-local-police.html.
Officials in Boston, for example: Anthony Rivas, “Boston Police Used Facial Recognition Software on Concertgoers; Will It Really Stop Suspicious Activity or Just Encroach upon Our Rights?,” Medical Daily, August 18, 2014, www.medicaldaily.com/boston-police-used-facial-recognition-software-concertgoers-will-it-really-stop-suspicious-298540.
In 2009, the Chicago Police Department: Matt Stroud, “The Minority Report: Chicago’s New Police Computer Predicts Crimes, but Is It Racist?,” Verge, February 19, 2014, www.theverge.com/2014/2/19/5419854/the-minority-report-this-computer-predicts-crime-but-is-it-racist.
the approximately four hundred people: Ibid.
a twenty-two-year-old high school dropout: Ibid.
CHAPTER 6
a young man named Kyle Behm: Lauren Weber and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Are Workplace Personality Tests Fair?,” Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2014, www.wsj.com/articles/are-workplace-personality-tests-fair-1412044257.
the “Five Factor Model” test: Roland Behm, phone interview by author, April 1, 2015.
Behm went on to send notices: Weber and Dwoskin, “Are Workplace Personality Tests Fair?”
considered a medical exam: ADA National Network, “What Limitations Does the ADA Impose on Medical Examinations and Inquiries About Disability?,” accessed January 9, 2016, https://adata.org/faq/what-limitations-does-ada-impose-medical-examinations-and-inquiries-about-disability.
Founded in the 1970s: “Kronos History: The Early Years,” Kronos website, accessed January 9, 2016, www.kronos.com/about/history.aspx.
Workforce Ready HR: “Workforce Ready HR,” Kronos website, accessed January 9, 2016, www.kronos.com/products/smb-solutions/workforce-ready/products/hr.aspx.
$500 million annual business: Weber and Dwoskin, “Are Workplace Personality Tests Fair?”
60 to 70 percent of prospective workers: Ibid.
Griggs v. Duke Power Company: NAACP Legal Defense Fund, “Case: Landmark: Griggs v. Duke Power Co.,” NAACP LDF website, accessed January 9, 2016, www.naacpldf.org/case/griggs-v-duke-power-co.
Frank Schmidt, a business professor: Whitney Martin, “The Problem with Using Personality Tests for Hiring,” Harvard Business Review, August 27, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/08/the-problem-with-using-personality-tests-for-hiring.
“The primary purpose of the test”: Roland Behm, phone interview by author, April 1, 2015.
Regulators in Rhode Island: Weber and Dwoskin, “Are Workplace Personality Tests Fair?”
The Wall Street Journal asked: Lauren Weber, “Better to Be Artistic or Responsible? Decoding Workplace Personality Tests,” Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2014/09/29/better-to-be-artistic-or-responsible-decoding-workplace-personality-tests/.
researchers from the University of Chicago: Marianne Bertrand, “Racial Bias in Hiring: Are Emily and Brendan More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” Research Highlights from the Chicago Graduate School of Business 4, no. 4 (2003), www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.html.
auditions with the musician hidden: Curt Rice, “How Blind Auditions Help Orchestras to Eliminate Gender Bias,” Guardian, October 14, 2013, www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias.
72 percent of résumés are never seen: Mona Abdel-Halim, “12 Ways to Optimize Your Resume for Applicant Tracking Systems,” Mashable, May 27, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/05/27/resume-tracking-systems/.
words the specific job opening is looking for: Ibid.
St. George’s Hospital Medical School: Stella Lowry and Gordon MacPherson, “A Blot on the Profession,” British Medical Journal 296 (March 5, 1988): 657–58.
Replacing a worker earning $50,000 a year: Heather Boushey and Sarah Jane Glynn, “There Are Significant Business Costs to Replacing Employees,” American Progress, November 16, 2012, www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2012/11/16/44464/there-are-significant-business-costs-to-replacing-employees/.
Evolv: Jessica Leber, “The Machine-Readable Workforce: Companies Are Analyzing More Data to Guide How They Hire, Recruit, and Promote Their Employees,” MIT Technology Review, May 27, 2013, www.technologyreview.com/news/514901/the-machine-readable-workforce/.
A pioneer in this field is Gild: Jeanne Meister, “2015: Social HR Becomes A Reality,” Forbes, January 5, 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/jeannemeister/2015/01/05/2015-social-hr-becomes-a-reality/.
Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist: Don Peck, “They’re Watching You at Work,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2013, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/.
CHAPTER 7
the New York
Times ran a story: Jodi Kantor, “Working Anything but 9 to 5: Scheduling Technology Leaves Low-Income Parents with Hours of Chaos,” New York Times, August 13, 2014, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-workers-scheduling-hours.html?_r=0.
Within weeks of the article’s publication: Jodi Kantor, “Starbucks to Revise Policies to End Irregular Schedules for Its 130,000 Baristas,” New York Times, August 14, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/08/15/us/starbucks-to-revise-work-scheduling-policies.html.
Starbucks was failing to meet these targets: Justine Hofherr, “Starbucks Employees Still Face ‘Clopening,’ Understaffing, and Irregular Workweeks,” Boston.com, September 24, 2015, www.boston.com/jobs/news/2015/09/24/starbucks-employees-still-face-clopening-understaffing-and-irregular-workweeks/FgdhbalfQqC2p1WLaQm2SK/story.html.
The Allies kept track: William Ferguson Story, “A Short History of Operations Research in the United States Navy,” master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, December 1968, https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofop00stor.
Following World War II: US Congress, Offices of Technology Assessment, A History of the Department of Defense Federally FundedResearch and Development Centers, OTA-BP-ISS-157 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 1995), www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1995/9501/9501.PDF.
In the 1960s, Japanese auto companies: John Holusha, “ ‘Just-In-Time’ System Cuts Japan’s Auto Costs,” New York Times, March 25, 1983, www.nytimes.com/1983/03/25/business/just-in-time-system-cuts-japan-s-auto-costs.html.
the Economic Policy Institute: Leila Morsy and Richard Rothstein, “Parents’ Non-standard Work Schedules Make Adequate Childrearing Difficult,” Economic Policy Institute, August 6, 2015, www.epi.org/publication/parents-non-standard-work-schedules-make-adequate-childrearing-difficult-reforming-labor-market-practices-can-improve-childrens-cognitive-and-behavioral-outcomes/.
The legislation died: H.R. 5159—Schedules That Work Act, 113th Congress (2013–14), accessed January 10, 2016, www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/5159.
a San Francisco company called Cataphora: Stephen Baker, “Data Mining Moves to Human Resources,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March 11, 2009, www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2009-03-11/data-mining-moves-to-human-resources.
MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees: Joshua Rothman, “Big Data Comes to the Office,” New Yorker, June 3, 2014, www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/big-data-comes-to-the-office.
A Nation at Risk: National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html.
case of Tim Clifford: Tim Clifford, “Charting the Stages of Teacher Data Report Grief,” WNYC-FM, March 9, 2012, www.wnyc.org/story/302123-charting-the-stages-of-teacher-data-report-grief/.
he later told me: Tim Clifford, e-mail interview by the author, May 13, 2014.
researchers at Sandia National Laboratories: Tamim Ansary, “Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report,” Edutopia, March 9, 2007, www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk.
Simpson’s paradox: Clifford Wagner, “Simpson’s Paradox in Real Life,” American Statistician 36, no. 1 (1982): 46–48.
educator named Gary Rubinstein: Gary Rubinstein, “Analyzing Released NYC Value-Added Data Part 2,” Gary Rubinstein’s Blog, February 28, 2012, https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/.
Congress and the White House agreed: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “President Obama Signs into Law a Rewrite of No Child Left Behind,” New York Times, December 10, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/us/politics/president-obam-signs-into-law-a-rewrite-of-no-child-left-behind.html.
Cuomo’s education task force: Yoav Gonen and Carl Campanile, “Cuomo Vacktracks on Common Core, Wants 4-Year Moratorium,” New York Post, December 10, 2015, http://nypost.com/2015/12/10/cuomo-backtracks-on-common-core-wants-4-year-moratorium/.
boycott movement had kept 20 percent: Elizabeth Harris, “20% of New York State Students Opted Out of Standardized Tests This Year,” New York Times, August 12, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/nyregion/new-york-state-students-standardized-tests.html.
Tim Clifford was cheered: Tim Clifford, e-mail interview by author, December 15, 2015.
a proven tool against teachers’ unions: Emma Brown, “Education Researchers Caution Against Using Students’ Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers,” Washington Post, November 12, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/education-researchers-caution-against-using-value-added-models—ie-test-scores—to-evaluate-teachers/2015/11/12/72b6b45c-8950-11e5-be39-0034bb576eee_story.html.
CHAPTER 8
this banker would probably know: Dubravka Ritter, “Do We Still Need the Equal Credit Opportunity Act?,” Discussion Paper, Payment Cards Center, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, September 2012, https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedpdp/12-03.html.
were routinely locked out: Ibid.
model they called FICO: Martha Poon, “Scorecards as Devices for Consumer Credit: The Case of Fair, Isaac & Company Incorporated,” Sociological Review 55 (October 2007): 284–306, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00740.x.
FICO’s website: FICO website, accessed January 10, 2016, www.myfico.com/CreditEducation/ImproveYourScore.aspx.
you have the legal right to ask: Free Credit Reports, Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Information, accessed January 10, 2016, www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0155-free-credit-reports.
company called Neustar: Natasha Singer, “Secret E-Scores Chart Consumers’ Buying Power,” New York Times, August 18, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/electronic-scores-rank-consumers-by-potential-value.html.
Credit card companies such as Capital One: Emily Steel and Julia Angwin, “On the Web’s Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2010, www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703294904575385532109190198.
“good credit scores are sexy”: Website CreditScoreDating.com, accessed January 10, 2016, http://creditscoredating.com/.
Society for Human Resource Management: Gary Rivlin, “The Long Shadow of Bad Credit in a Job Search,” New York Times, May 11, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/business/employers-pull-applicants-credit-reports.html.
A 2012 survey on credit card debt: Amy Traub, “Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out of a Job,” Demos, February 2013, www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Discredited-Demos.pdf.
the single biggest cause of bankruptcies: Christina LaMontagne, “NerdWallet Health Finds Medical Bankruptcy Accounts for Majority of Personal Bankruptcies,” NerdWallet, March 26, 2014, www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/medical-costs/medical-bankruptcy/.
white households held on average: Tami Luhby, “The Black-White Economic Divide in 5 Charts,” CNN Money, November 25, 2015, http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/24/news/economy/blacks-whites-inequality/.
only 15 percent of whites: Rakesh Kochhar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor, “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics: Twent
y-to-One,” Pew Research Center, July 26, 2011, www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/.
ten states have passed legislation: National Conference of State Legislatures, “Use of Credit Information in Employment 2013 Legislation,” NCSL website, updated September 29, 2014, www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and-commerce/use-of-credit-info-in-employ-2013-legis.aspx.
The Federal Trade Commission reported: Federal Trade Commission, “In FTC Study, Five Percent of Consumers Had Errors on Their Credit Reports That Could Result in Less Favorable Terms for Loans,” FTC website, February 11, 2013, www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/02/ftc-study-five-percent-consumers-had-errors-their-credit-reports.
Mississippi’s attorney general: Gretchen Morgenson, “Held Captive by Flawed Credit Reports,” New York Times, June 21, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/business/held-captive-by-flawed-credit-reports.html.
a Philadelphian named Helen Stokes: Joe Palazzolo and Gary Fields, “Fight Grows to Stop Expunged Criminal Records Living On in Background Checks,” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/fight-grows-to-stop-expunged-criminal-records-living-on-in-background-checks-1430991002.
in a bucket of people: Office of Oversight and Investigations, “A Review of the Data Broker Industry: Collection, Use, and Sale of Consumer Data for Marketing Purposes,” Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, December 18, 2013, http://educationnewyork.com/files/rockefeller_databroker.pdf.
an Arkansas resident named Catherine Taylor: Ylan Q. Mui, “Little-Known Firms Tracking Data Used in Credit Scores,” Washington Post, July 16, 2011, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/little-known-firms-tracking-data-used-in-credit-scores/2011/05/24/gIQAXHcWII_story.html.