It’s not a social credit system because it doesn’t weight your social involvement in the society (political party, school credentials, race) but rather payment history, amount of debt, types of credit
Not at all. It is simply a score based on your ability to manage credit, it is scored differently based on the company making the assessment.
In reality that means "have you paid off what you owe in the manner that was agreed" and does the person have any red flags e.g. County Court Judgements against their name or residence.
There are people I know that manage it properly and those that don't. It has nothing to do with wealth or class.
It doesn’t inherently have to do with wealth and class, however, all of these things are so tightly correlated that it loses barely any fidelity and just saves you a little bit of time to assume that someone with an 815 credit score is law-abiding, upper-middle or high social class, and has a medium to high net worth, and that somebody with a 550 credit score is at least one of the following: poor, criminal history, and a low social class.
None of this should be that surprising: it’s hard to make all of your debt payment payments on time if you’re either broke or in jail.
No having a high credit score has nothing do with your wealth or social class. I have worked in this industry briefly. It looks at your ability to manage credit, and whether you have any flags.
e.g. I had a 995 credit score on Experian back in the late 2000s. The highest was 999. I earned £18,000 at the time, and was in my mid-20s and didn't really own anything at the time. I did have a credit card at the time where I made the payments, and I lived at a household which had no debt, and I was on the electoral roll.
That is why when you are making larger purchases they do a "means test" e.g. see if you earn enough to pay a mortgage.
Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.
Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race. This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.
Because there is already a barrier to prevent that. Defaulting on the home loan or not paying rent and facing eviction. Having a barrier based on past behavior is stupid. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." Funny how that works for investment banks to cover their ass but they can't see how it might also apply to individuals.
I realize that you responded to a specific statement, not necessarily the entire context of the thread. However:
Saying that a person’s credit score is entirely due to their own financial decisions is incorrect because it’s overly simplistic, that’s true, although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story). It can also depend on circumstances specific to the person but not directly related to their own actions (e.g. their credit provider revises credit limits across the board due to external factors, so their credit utilization changes too, without them having used any more or less of it).
In addition, and what you’re alluding to, is that these models are continuously revised. A set of behaviors and circumstances that lead to a higher score in one economic environment may not do the same in another.
Credit scores as implemented in for instance the US are not a direct reflection of a person’s moral character or intended as a reward for good behavior. They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits. This also enables credit providers to give out more credit overall, based on less biased criteria (not unbiased, because models are never perfect and financial circumstances can be proxies for other attributes).
One can feel however one wants about whether this system is good or not. But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
> although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story).
This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.
Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.
> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.
This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.
> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.
We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”