[skookum]

> other factors (like current wealth and income) are far more important in practice - and this leads to paradoxical and absurd situations

From the perspective of the finance industry, these "absurd situations" are so far below the level of noise that they are effectively theoretical. If you want to discuss "in practice": in practice the users of the US credit system have no "current wealth" worth speaking of (look up the median net worth of US households), and their ability to maintain their existing debt is the defining feature of their financial status.

[int_19h]

Income is more important than wealth, anyway.

Again, there are many countries - including First World European countries - that don't have the credit score system, or only have reports on non-payments (usually govt-run). They seem to be doing just fine.

[skookum]

Lenders in the US are just trying to maximize their risk-adjusted profit - there's no conspiracy here. If income alone was just as good as income + debt servicing history for making the statistical decisions required to maximize credit industry profits (decisions like whether or not to lend, at what rate, at what ratio to income/assets, etc), do you think the lenders would pay the overhead of the additional useless tracking? Are you suggesting that Equifax & Co. are pulling a fast one on the US lenders and their armies of actuaries and after all these years the lenders haven't noticed the uselessness of the product?

[int_19h]

Not at all. My point, rather, is that the credit industry can still function pretty damn well without having access to aggregated credit history and scores, and so banning the practice altogether, or severely limiting the amount of data so collected, in the interests of public good (privacy protections etc), should be considered a viable option on the table.