this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Do people want to go back to the system that was used before credit scores? Where the person serving the loan just made the choice based off if they thought you seemed trustworthy? Aka were a white man who went to the same church as them.
Maybe the answer is less reliance on a debt based economy. Maybe the answer is to not bake into the fabric of society a mechanism that makes a lifetime of debt a foregone conclusion. Kill the loan shark for all I care. Why does everyone need a loan? Because it's built to require one.
In an economy where skill (supposedly) correlates to income, income is expected to increase across a lifetime.
Therefore 25 year-old me borrowing excess income from 45 year-old me is a good thing, purely egotistically.
Furthermore lack of debt means every big purchase is preceded by hoarding. No matter which way you look at it this is bad for society. If I had 50k€ laying around it would be much more efficient resource-wise to lend it to my neighbor so they can build up their business, than to keep the money under my mattress and tell them to tighten their belt for another five years. They get a business, I get a bit more money in the end, everyone is richer and the economy is stronger.
Economics are not a zero-sum game. This belief that "if someone is making money then someone else is getting robbed" is deeply damaging, especially as it seems to be the main economic driver for Trump's batshit insane administration.
Debt is good. Predatory practices are not. That is what regulations are supposed to curtail. Where I live "credit scores" are not a thing, banks only loan to you based on proof of income, a declaration of open credit lines, and your civil status (age, partnership status, dependent people). Racism and sexism are of course an issue, although if caught the banks face big fines. But it's not like American credit scores are colorblind...
That was a great writeup. I see that "someone earning money hurts everyone else" mentality on Lemmy constantly, its maddeningly stupid.
Ok, so, telling lenders they cannot vet lenders is not reasonable.
Our critiques of credit scores does not automatically mean we want them abolished in favor the previous wink and a handshake.
But American credit scores don't measure your likelihood to pay back debts, they measure the likelihood of a lender to make money off of you. Those are nearly, but not quite, the same thing, and our current system, as the previous poster said, leads to a lifetime of debt obligations.
What we want is for life to not be dependant on debt.
Those are very different things.
The whole American credit system is frightening. You all but have to own a credit card (here they are only used by people travelling internationally), the credit card needs to be paid off manually (!?!? my bank just auto-withdraws the balance monthly), etc.
Here we employ a straightforward system to vet potential lenders : mortgages almost always have a contractual stipulation that you must use that bank to cash in your paychecks. Your bank will ask for proof of a stable income. You have to put down a downpayment. Defaulting on a mortgage furthermore puts you in a government registry; it's not "a wink and a handshake" as you put it, but a formal tightly-regulated process.
There is nothing that the credit score system does that the Belgian system doesn't achieve, except the part where it enables banks to prey on people through a privately owned and unregulated system used to push citizens towards short-term credit and needlessly dangerous financing habits. A 30 year-old with 50k€ in a savings account and no credit history sounds to me like someone who "should" get a mortgage a lot more than someone juggling 3 credit cards and a 10-year car loan. But the american credit system incentivizes the opposite. That is anarcho-capitalist predation.
As a person with very little debt, this is the way.
It's so cute you think that credit scores aren't racist.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/how-structural-racism-plays-a-role-in-lowering-credit-scores.html
Every system is racist because every system is human and humans are flawed. Credit scores include systemic racism and banks making calls based on their gut is direct practiced racism. Systemic racism is much easier to slowly over time work out as long as you recognize it. But the only way to stop direct racism is to take at least some of the power away from individuals.
The systemic racism like the structural one in the argument can only be gotten rid of if you entirely removed the concepts of loans. The problem with that is it is impossible. The majority of the folks who have attempted to outlaw usury and loans entirely are not really looked back upon fondly in a historical sense.
OR, maybe we need to make a new system. It’s not just credit scores or total anarchy, have some imagination, fuck.
For example, maybe a system where paying your credit card off on time or consistently having enough cash to not even need a credit card means that your “score” goes up. If it is truly about being reliable then that’s a no brainer, and yet…
We also shouldn’t be needing so much in the way of loans anyway and we deal with that by forcing minimum wage increases. It’s insane how much people have to put on cards and how normal it is to barely manage a monthly payment on a 30-40 year mortgage. The US and Canada specifically demand that you own a car and the weather is often very hard on them, too, yet once again the prices go up and up and you have to hope for the best that you can afford the payments which hide their increases behind and extended term or only a few more dollars which adds up to thousands on the other end.
That's not so bad even
in this case, because that's a local direct connection as opposed to centralized.
The world works better when people help those closer in the society to them first. That's also how routing metrics work in computer networks. This might seem gibberish, but I had a less fuzzy explanation, just forgot it.
Ah. Evolution. Connections form dependency both ways. And there's always evolution in the society. It's in your interest that racists would mostly connect to other racists, while smarter people to other smarter people, and dumber people to other dumber people, for evolution to work. Except, of course, that should preserve some mobility between these groups so that smarter people born in not so smart environment could change it, again for social evolution.
It's important, somehow mostly talking about evolution in present time is attributed to fascists, while it can be seen everywhere.
In some sense who you are, who the person giving a loan is, and how that affects getting a loan is a predictive mechanism. It should work or fail for evolution.
Credit scores are a path around that similarly to Soviet planned economy being a path around markets, see how it worked that USSR, rich with resources beyond belief, had mostly poor and even malnourished population.
The world doesn't work better if people help those closest to them. The majority of the strife in the world exists because people help those close to them and treat others as outsiders. You can look at any system ever used and the point of failure is always someone tipping the scales intentionally to favor those near them.
A bandit kills a traveler, the former is to blame because he initiated the action, the latter is to blame for being unarmed.
Those "tipping the scales intentionally to favor those near them" succeed because others don't help those closer to them first.
And you can tell worthy endeavor from unworthy one better when it's someone close to you. Thus more often helping the good things and more rarely helping the bad things.
So no, it does. Those near to you are on the opposite side of the spectrum from states, ideas and -isms. They are also more like you, as opposed to things you don't know. Your life is just your own life. Unique and only one.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84B00274R000300150009-5.pdf
The document you've linked talks about common perceptions and not much else, it's short.
Anyway, nutrition is not just about amount of calories, one can consume a lot of calories but get scurvy.
BTW, the reason Soviet scurvy stats were not atrocious is that "sea cabbage" older generations remember (and hate, but it was there) being present in stores despite any deficit, and that all salt sold for food was iodised.
So - first, I'm not talking about amount of calories, second, I've read American food is notoriously bad nutrition-wise. Comparing USSR to Finland might be a better one.