[gowld]

You are conflating "social credit score", which hasn't been built out in China (although blacklisting, imprisonment, and torture for wrongthink has been built out), with "financial credit score" which exists in USA via private companies working togther, and "credit reports" which exist in both USA and China. China's is run by the unelected, dictatorial government.

[darthoctopus]

perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.

[throwawayq3423]

Your credit score in America will never be used to deny your freedom of movement within America or go against you or any of your family members when applying for higher education.

It is a fundamentally flawed comparison.

[scarmig]

It will, however, be used to determine whether you can rent or buy a home or increasingly even get a job. Freedom: same outcomes, but modulated through the market!

[throwawayq3423]

> determine whether you can rent or buy a home

Yes, that's the point of a credit score.

> increasingly even get a job

Do you have any citation of proof of this? I've never heard of this happening even once.

[AnimalMuppet]

It might be used to deny your kid a college loan, though - which might work out the same as denying them higher education.

[platevoltage]

It absolutely works the same way. There are would be doctors everywhere who never got the chance because of their parent's mistakes, or misfortunes, because we've made higher education a privilege in the country.

[corimaith]

At this point of extrapolating from second-order/third-order effects, what dosen't count as "social credit" to you? It seems that if society dosen't give everything you want, that's seen as coercion.

The actual distinction here is between positive/negative rights. In OP's case, it's if even if you do have the money to do X thing, you are artifically not allowed to do so. That's a violation of negative rights.

In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back. That's an appeal to positive rights, that people have a active obligation to you, and it's not even from the government but from private lenders. That's a far more contentious assumption that ironically isn't held by the Chinese or the CCP or most of the world for that matter outside of a spoilt corner of the West. And it's a critique that dosen't even land in reality when the Fed does provide easy student loans at a far greater scale than the Chinese Government. A policy that has worked out swimmingly well!

[anigbrowl]

In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back.

Please read it again. It was hypothesized that you could have a hard time getting a college loan if your parents had bad credit. Now, you could construct an argument for why that policy makes sense for credit issuers, such as 'statistics show that 87% of debtors' children go on to become debtors themselves'. But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.

[throwawayq3423]

I don't believe that simply because of the predatory nature of student loans. They'll give them to literally anyone.

[timeon]

In US they have just one more party than in China. Also 1 person is not automatically 1 vote.

[NoGravitas]

"The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." -- Julius Nyerere

[corimaith]

So you believe there is no difference between what Trump is doing today and what Kamala/Biden might have been doing?

Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.

[NoGravitas]

In effect, the difference is much less than you imply.