A review by jklugman
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

3.0

Lepore's exploration of the Simulmatics Corporation is mildly interesting, but from reading this book I only had a superficial grasp of the actual analyses that Simultatics did, how it actually informed political decisions by the Kennedy campaign (I gather it didn't have much of an impact on campaign decisions), and the legacy of its analysis on subsequent work. The sense I get is that this company is merely an interesting footnote in the history of applied quantitative political science, that it made outsized claims for its insights, and it is probably more interesting for how applied social scientists ripped off people rather than paving the way for Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.