The Biden Administration wants to replace the three major consumer credit reporting agencies with a public agency.
The proposal is still just that—a proposal—and it faces fierce opposition from industry lobbyists. The Consumer Data Industry Association, for example, a trade group that represents the credit bureaus, wrote in a September article that a new credit bureau was “a dangerous idea” and that “a government-owned credit bureau would create a volatile and unstable lending environment, riddled with inconsistent policies, swing back and forth from election to election, leaving consumers with higher prices and limited options for credit” among other criticisms.
That is the least of it. Here are just a few other objections.
1. The credit reporting process works really well. It would cost the taxpayers billions of dollars to set up a government-run system, and then it might be faulty (Obamacare web site rollout? vaccination appointment systems?).
2. The objections of the “consumer credit justice advocates” have more to do with how the credit data is evaluated than with how the data is reported and stored. To get the change that they want, they could have the government develop its own credit scoring system, which would be less risky and much less costly.
3. In fact, those advocates are wrong about credit scoring. Yes, credit scores tend to be lower for disadvantaged populations. But a low credit score is just as predictive of default for a black person as for a white person. You cannot make someone with a low credit score a good risk any more than you can make a person who is under 6 feet tall an NBA superstar.
4. The “consumer credit justice advocates,” if they get there way, will set up more disadvantaged people to fail by taking on too much debt. Then when these loans go bad, these same advocates will blame the banks for “predatory lending.”
5. It’s a darn shame that the money going to these advocacy groups and that is going to pay lobbyists to fend them off could not instead be given to charities that really do help people in need.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
I think the goal is to give credit to people that won’t pay it back, and it will be forgiven in bankruptcy or never collected on. In effects it’s kind of a “free money grant via default”.
Right. “Predictable Failure Then Predictable Bailout” is the politically optimal way to go about these things.
If social justice advocates think there is an untapped market for underserved community loans why not start a business serving this community instead of using the government to force everyone else to serve this community?
Because the loans aren’t supposed to make money. It’s a grant program disguised as a loan program.
Credit reporting agencies will be successfully pressured to yield, not because they are unfair, but because they are fair.
The old progressives and modernists believed in the ability of ‘Science’ to discover evidence and derive objectively correct answers to questions of policy, and that the influence of experts using this knowledge would improve our politics and tame power by imposing these empirical and rationalist constraints on decision making.
But the trouble is, if you open a channel between power and knowledge, there is no diode and the current can flow both ways. Knowledge does not seem to be much of an impediment to power, but power seems to have no trouble at all corrupting every part in the entire machine of knowledge production, so who is really taming whom? “Follow the Science!” is really “Science, the follower.”
So, whenever you’ve got a system that is solid and predictive and produces results that while actually correct are politically incorrect, then that system is going to be made to yield, one way or another.
If one accepts this as a kind of unavoidable inevitability, then the implications are as obvious as they are seemingly impossible for most modern minds to parse. That to the extent there is any level of judicial review that asks whether a particular exercise of power is lawful, it should never hinge on – or even involve whatsoever – any questions of evidence or rationality. The only question must be only whether or not the constitutional structure granted the particular authority to the particular official, and not whether that power was used wisely or foolishly, capriciously or rationally, lovingly or spitefully.
This seems disappointing and probably just a little nuts to people who think there should be more robust and rigorous mechanisms to compel officials to think straight, be fair, and use evidence and reason.
Well, it would be nice if you could do that, but actually, you can’t. Politicians are going to do what they want regardless, but your knowledge creation machine is invaluably precious and fragile and innovation is the engine of our prosperity, and so the farther you can keep it away from the corruptions of power the better off everyone will be and the more likely it is that bad people won’t care to get their hands around the goose that lays your golden eggs and strangle it to death to squeeze that one last egg out of it a little quicker.
Now, all that being said, there remains a big problem. All systems of power require some salient narrative of legitimacy that explains to people why the people who have power ‘deserve’ to wield it, and what uses of that power are proper or improper, good or bad. That is “The State Religion” of any modern society, as it is of a fundamentally ideological and even philosophically metaphysical nature, and whether it is acknowledged as such or Deistic or Theistic is really irrelevant.
The trouble is, ‘Science’ is what I call the ‘trans-magisterium’ of our political system, the institution to which one makes ultimate appeal to any question in any domain, having effectively replaced ‘God’ or ‘The Church’ centuries ago among our elite classes. People are perfectly comfortable with the obvious historical reality of politics and power corrupting religion, or at least, anyone with eyes to see and a brain to think should not consider the matter reasonably contestable at this point.
Part of the problem is that if politics needs legitimation, validation, and sanctification, i.e., to have their desired activities be ‘blessed off’ by the authority behind The State Religion as the cover story that is required by any political formula, then once again current flows downstream from power and the religious authority will be made to agree, by hook or by crook.
So the trouble is, if you’ve got to keep Science away from power, but power requires legitimacy, and Science is the only remaining ultimate source of legitimacy, then … you’re stuck in a trap into which any sufficiently advanced civilization is going to fall, and from which there is no easy escape.
I’ve worked in finance and insurance nearly all my life. Both of these are the #1 examples of “backdoor deniable subsidy schemes.” You want to give free stuff to group X, but you can’t just say “the following action just gives free stuff to X, I’m engaging in a naked power grab sucker.” You have to have some kind of narrative about how it’s not really free. Like how people had to pretend to pay into SS for a few years before they started paying out benefits.
The thing I’m always explaining to people in my industry is that everything they learned about how “insurable risk” is the backbone of what we do is a sham. There is no insurable risk. Those exams you passed for your certification are a fraud. It’s a special interest subsidy program disguised as an insurance policy. Once you accept that, things make sense.
Finance and insurance are so interwoven with government subsidy and regulation that its fair to call them not insurance policies but constituent subsidy laundering and deniably services.
>–“The thing I’m always explaining to people in my industry is that everything they learned about how “insurable risk” is the backbone of what we do is a sham.”
So why not quit this job in favor of one you don’t have to be ashamed of then? Where is your responsibility and agency? You sound like part of the very problem you are whining about. It’s always somebody else’s fault your life isn’t turning out the way you think it should. You are a ninja level master of the grievance game.
One reason you are so angry about the various progressive grievance victim shams is that you are running one of your own and competing for the title of most victimized victim of all.
Greg, as far as I know, you don’t know much about me at all. I’m not complaining about myself here, I’m stating a fact relevant to the post, that a lot of the work in these industries is about laundering subsidy schemes by calling them insurance. This proposal seems like more the same.
I’ve quit jobs many times. I’ve shifted careers. I became a whistleblower once. All in all I’d say I’ve taken bigger risks and made bigger sacrifices in my career than most people I know.
The last time I tried to switch jobs I took huge personal risks and a big paycut to do something I thought would be meaningful, only to find out I had been lied to in the interview. In addition the stresses involved in that job put me in the hospital where I was very sick and proved physically unsustainable.
At a certain point I wasn’t a single young man anymore, I had a family to support, and so the negatives of risk taking became a lot more important. I decided that anything that would take me endanger their ability to live a decent life or make it so I couldn’t be a father to them was a bridge too far. On top of that I’m more knowledgeable and pragmatic about what I can accomplish in life given my age, nature, skill sets, and existing commitments.
None of this has anything to do with progressivism. The personal details of my life have absolutely nothing to do with whether having a government agency take over credit scoring so it can implement some kind of SJW social credit system is a good idea or not. That fact won’t change whether I was a serial killer or Mother Theresa.
As to political/social issues that directly effect my life, and there sure have been a lot of them in this pandemic year, I retain the right to complain about them because I have legitimate grievances, much like the millions of others complaining about the same things.
asdf,
>—” The personal details of my life have absolutely nothing to do with whether having a government agency take over credit scoring so it can implement some kind of SJW social credit system is a good idea or not.”
Quite right. In fact I agree that government credit scoring is a bad idea and my opinion on that has nothing to do with the details of your life. The suggestion that there is a connection there is just a transparently bizarre straw man argument.
>—“Greg, as far as I know, you don’t know much about me at all. ”
You talk about the details of your life constantly in your comments, more than anyone else I can think of actually. For example, in the very comment I replied to you said that you “worked in finance and insurance nearly all (your) life.” That seems like long time to choose to work in an industry you go on to describe as throughly disreputable and complicit “in a naked power grab.”
>—” I retain the right to complain about them because I have legitimate grievances…”
Yes, you have the right to complain. But not without other people also having the right to point out that we really do know the many details of your life that you insist on telling us about or asking why you don’t hold yourself to the same standards of personal responsibility you complain of others lacking.
I’m pretty sure that Greg is onto something here. I’m thinking that asdf would probably win the top whiner award among commenters here. My recent favorite was his swimming adventure with his kids and the locker room sterilization procedures at the pool…why not just change before you go…problem solved.
I’m not sure “I’ve worked in finance/insurance most of my life” is a detail that warrants your decision that I’m a whiner that never tries to improve my life or that it justifies your warped political beliefs.
I ended up in finance originally because:
1) I was good at math and finance on the standardized tests.
2) I grew up in the NYC area and got a chance at a finance internship very early in life.
3) My families knowledge of finance and/or the broader professional world was limited to the fact that it paid well and provided a stable future. My Dad was a truck driver, none of us knew anything about the professional world. His only advice to me was to go to college, get a practical major, and don’t become a truck driver.
4) Having grown up relatively poor and with a father that was constantly sick, my career ambitions essentially amounted to “don’t end up poor without health insurance like my dad.” In fact when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up in kindergarten I literally asked which jobs had health insurance.
5) So I got into finance largely because I was good at it, the opportunity was right there, and I didn’t know enough about the world to question it. Everyone I knew was proud of me and nobody seemed to think it was wrong.
After being on Wall Street awhile I did decide it was corrupt and should do something else with my life. I quit and was beginning a career change, but then my Dad got really sick. I felt the responsible thing to do was to start work right away in a career that could support my parents. So I compromised. I walked into a temp agency on a Friday, got an office job on a Monday, got hired to a full time to another job there within a month, and studied for my actuarial exams at night. It seemed like a medium ground between not going back to Wall Street and fulfilling my responsibility to my family.
I did boring but stable insurance jobs for awhile, then took a chance trying to get into health insurance reform during the Obamacare era. Obamacare and healthcare regulation proved to be a dumpster fire so I got another insurance job.
Years later I decided to take another shot at improving the world and got a job at a non profit where I was supposed to be identifying and prosecuting fraud, but it turned out they lied to me in the interview and asked me to change my entire resume on my first day to match the new totally unrelated job description they wanted me to fill. Also, they let like 95% of fraud go unchecked. Finally, after trying and failing to make that work I ended up in the hospital and acknowledged the fact that I physically couldn’t keep banging my head into a wall. So I went back to my old job. Which I’m good at and do well, I just find it unsatisfying. But it provides for my family and gives me a lot of time with my kids.
I can think of things I could do right now that might make the insurance market less corrupt. But I have no way of absolutely guaranteeing they would have a meaningful impact, and it would definitely ruin me and my families lives and not just in the lose my current job way. When I was on that hospital bed and my wife was next to me holding my hand, I thought about everything she has done for me. And I weighed that love against what I thought all the people I might be able to help would do for me in a similar situation. And I came to the conclusion that they probably wouldn’t stick their necks out for me, so why would I put the people in my life that love me through hell for strangers that probably wouldn’t do the same for me. I admitted I was a middle aged man with a three generations of people to take care of in my household and this was probably what I was going to be doing with my life until the mortgage is paid off. That I couldn’t keep taking huge chances and making big personal sacrifices now that I’m not a young single man anymore. I’m comfortable with that conclusion, though you seem to have a big problem with it and think it invalidates my observations about unrelated phenomenon.
Yes, I think my expertise in this industry gives me knowledge on which to opine about it.
Yes, I think I can comment on issues that affect me an my family in a meaningful way and often aren’t things I have any control over.
Yes, the extreme interventions in my and everyone else’s lives over the last year have dramatically increased the daily impact of outside forces upon quality of life leaving people feeling they aren’t in control of large swaths of what goes on in their lives. I do in fact discuss examples some of the daily impositions I’ve noticed in the lockdown era.
Hans,
I do bring them to the place in their swimsuits. When we get out of the pool they are soaking wet. I want to wash them off and get them into dry clothes. To make them more comfortable, to not get the car all wet, to not have my kids have to trudge through the winter frost in a wet bathing suit to get into a cold car (this one may fly over your head down in Texas).
I find your stance curious. Do you support the cleaning procedures that government has required? If not, why are you defending them?
My example is pretty straight forward. I have elderly people living in my household. I’ve tried to keep them safe by minimizing risky indoor activities, the cleaning procedure increases my risk while accomplishing nothing. Why shouldn’t I complain about it? Why shouldn’t I want it changed? Why are you taking the side of waste and inconvenience?
I mean this cleaning procedure thing comes up all the time. For instance, sometimes we have to leave the local playground for fifteen minutes so they can spray it down. The lockers at the pool are closed so I have to leave everything out where it can get stolen and just take that chance. It’s dumb. Why are you on the side of dumb? What’s libertarian or conservative about supporting all this various COVID nonsense being imposed by fiat?
There isn’t virtue in saying “I’m fucked over but I’m going to passively accept it without complaint”.
asdf,
>—-“I’m not sure “I’ve worked in finance/insurance most of my life” is a detail that warrants your decision that I’m a whiner that never tries to improve my life or that it justifies your warped political beliefs.”
First of all, why do you insist on propping up this pathetic straw man argument that I’m saying that my political beliefs are justified by the details of your personal life. They aren’t and I’ve been perfectly clear on that.
You claimed that I don’t know much about you at all while you were literally in the midst of one of your routine and compulsive massive dumps of personal information. The purpose of me pointing that out was not to say it “justifies” (your characterization) my political views. It was to justify my challenge to your claim that I “don’t know much about you at all.”
In fact I know far more about the details of your life than any other commenter on the entire internet. I know more than I want to know about it. You won’t shut up about it. You constantly choose to use these personal details to justify your political views rather than argue more general principles.
Don’t you think that every member of the other races, and underclass that you routinely tell us how much you despise also have their own personal hard luck stories and and genuine real life constraints to blame for their lack of agency and personal responsibility? Why should that only be a valid excuse for you?
Greg,
Your stated political belief that you constantly clash with me on is that you believe members of the underclass anywhere in the world are entitled to use force to extract from others a potentially infinite set of resources because you feel they need/deserve them.
I oppose this political principle, and think they should have to make it on their own merits. I have voiced various reasons as to why. If some of them don’t make it, that’s life. You find this sentiment intolerable, and are willing to use any level of violence necessary to get your way.
I’m agnostic about the value of self funded social insurance amongst relative homogenous and productive groups. I can see the value but there are lots of drawbacks too, and I’m less keen on it than when I was younger. I think straight up open ended welfare of the kind you support isn’t even worth discussing.
I haven’t asked anyone to do anything for me. I just want people to stop preventing myself from doing things or stealing from me. For wanting to not be interfered with you call me a whiner.
What exactly do you want me to do? Shoot the nearest IRS agent? Break into a CVS and steal a vaccine? I complain about things I lack to power to change precisely because I lack the power to change them. If I could change them, I would just do it.
I don’t “blame” the underclass for their nature. I simply think they are doomed regardless of what personal agency they try to exert. I think any society with too many of them is similarly doomed. I don’t think “blame” is even useful as a concept in this matter. Things simply are or aren’t true. Will or won’t have certain likely outcomes. I desire certain outcomes over others, and certain actions are likely to bring those about. That’s true whether anyone is to “blame” or not.
The closest thing I get to moral disgust is either:
1) Unforced errors
2) Extreme utility destruction for trivial reasons
What has happened in so many cases during this pandemic hits on those two pretty hard.
asdf,
>—“I haven’t asked anyone to do anything for me. I just want people to stop preventing myself from doing things or stealing from me. For wanting to not be interfered with you call me a whiner.”
Now you make a libertarian anarcho-capitalist argument. But this is a transparently fake pose.
You have spoken out many times in favor of highly authoritarian government policies including government sponsored torture and the curtailment of political freedom for those you disagree with. You really want an authoritarian government that does exactly what you think it should regardless of how many OTHER people are “interfered with” by that government.
>—“What exactly do you want me to do?
I want you to be honest about the fact that you are moving the goalposts here. Maybe this is the moment for you to switch from the libertarian pose to the entirely Hobbesian one you occasionally espouse where everybody is a bad person in a relatively zero sum hostile world including you so you can’t be blamed for fighting for your share.
That at least would compensate with honesty for what it lacks in knowledge of history, economics, and ethics.
I’m not making a libertarian anarcho anything. I don’t believe in natural rights. I believe your rights are only what you can grasp by force.
I think that it can be in peoples interest to agree to certain rules and laws that allow us to build prosperous societies instead of all becoming highway robbers. Not because they come from natural law, but because they come from a confluence of interests between the parties.
I respect other “rights” in the hopes that they will respect mine. It’s a selfish act of sorts. If I think they are unlikely to respect my rights despite my respecting theirs, then I see no reason to be a fool that is taken advantage of.
What is commonly referred to as libertarian norms and rules seems to only work amongst certain people under certain circumstances. Libertarian norms appear to completely break down if you have too many underclass people in your society, especially if they can vote or be organized as a political force.
This observation isn’t a problem for me, because I don’t think libertarian norms come from some natural law that applies to everyone all of the time. I want my kids to grow up in a certain kind of society in which many libertarian norms are more common. I believe letting a bunch of underclass people into the body politic makes that state of affairs improbable, and so I oppose letting such people into the body politic.
If I’m wrong, they will likely be able to form their own body politic and thrive on their own. If not, then I was right to exclude them. Either way, I wish them no ill will if they go off and do their own thing without bothering me.
“authoritarian government policies including government sponsored torture and the curtailment of political freedom for those you disagree with.”
I’m not sure who you think I want tortured for what. If you can explain it to me I suppose I could accept or deny the claim.
If someone disagrees that I should be free to do things or to keep my own money, they of course I’m going to oppose them, by force if it’s within my power. I mean I don’t respect the political freedom of others to violate my rights or reach into my pocket book.
“You really want an authoritarian government that does exactly what you think it should regardless of how many OTHER people are “interfered with” by that government.”
What exactly do you think I want the government to do? Can you spell it out for me? This “authoritarian” stuff is pretty vague.
I mean when my car gets broken into, I really do wish they would find the crook. I found the lack of interest the government showed on that matter pretty delegitimizing. I’m not sure what other authoritarian actions I’m supposed to have in my wheelhouse.
>—“I respect other “rights” in the hopes that they will respect mine. It’s a selfish act of sorts. If I think they are unlikely to respect my rights despite my respecting theirs, then I see no reason to be a fool that is taken advantage of.”
Yeah that could work if you really did judge people as individuals based on their actions rather than deciding ahead of time you have essentially all the information you need from their skin color as you claim the right to do in your “if I think” qualification.
Greg,
If I admit a billion Africans to America and give them citizenship, I can’t look into each of their souls and know exactly how every single one of them will behave before the fact. However, I’ve got a lot of evidence that allows me to accurately guess how those billion people are going to behave on net with all the little individual quirks subsumed into the average. It’s not good.
That’s literally what I do for a living, I predict the performances of groups knowing that when N is high enough the performance of the group tends more and more towards that average and can be predicted with reasonable deviations. The random individual actions of the individuals become meaningless, just mutually cancelling noise swirling around their average.
Anyone working with large groups understands that there is a limit to how much time and resources you can spend underwriting entry into a group before it reaches negative ROI. At that point you either decide the group is worth selling to, or its not. Sometimes insurance companies decide not to enter markets because the underwriting is just too difficult. Sometimes body politic shouldn’t get in the “hoover up the entire third world” market.
You seem to imply that infinite underwriting expense should be applied to every single individual in every single situation. That is quite literally impossible. Nobody does that. Employers don’t do it with potential employees, schools don’t do it with potential students, even spouses don’t do it with everyone they date. At some point you just make some assumptions based on incomplete data largely by trying to notice patterns based on past experience. This is something less then the kind of accuracy you might expect from Saint Peter judging you at the Gates of Heaven, but its what we’ve got to do in the real world.
I think I’ve done enough underwriting on “third world immigration” to know its a bad risk, especially if its totally unfiltered. This says nothing about their souls, but their likely group impact on the society I live in.
>—“If I admit a billion Africans to America…
You really are relentless with the straw men. I have never advocated admitting a billion Africans or even ANY number of “totally unfiltered” immigrants. I’m not an open borders guy as I have told you before. (Yes, I know it’s easier to argue against that.)
I am not arguing against the use of risk statistics in underwriting insurance policies.
I am saying that when you make judgments about the human worth and character and work ethic of people there is an ethical obligation to judge them by their actions as individuals, not as members of a group based a belief that you have some deep understanding of their genetics that you clearly don’t have.
My ancestors came to this country with nothing, desperate for opportunity and made something of themselves and I bet yours did too. They were lucky they weren’t judged by you on the way in.
asdf,
Nothing has flown over my head about the weather. Stuck at home under a foot of snow and ten degree temperatures here in North Texas.
Locker rooms and public restrooms are a total non-starter for us (regardless of the pandemic), so we always avoid them at all costs. And, it’s pretty easy to engineer around them.
More broadly, I’m primarily concerned about the big ticket items (e.g. can my child go to school in-person? Are middle class folks able to go to work to earn a living or are they stuck at home depressed? Can we go out for a nice meal or for shopping at “non-essential” businesses, Etc.). I’m much less concerned about the smaller inconveniences even if they are mostly theater (e.g. face masks, endless sterilization procedures, etc.).
Heading over to Disney World again this June. Gonna have a blast even though we will be required to wear face masks each day at the park. Contrast this with Disneyland in California…still completely and totally closed. Pick your battles, my friend.
>—“Nothing has flown over my head about the weather. Stuck at home under a foot of snow and ten degree temperatures here in North Texas.”
Yeah, even before you replied I could see he had epic and historically bad timing for suggesting you weren’t familiar with winter down there in north Texas Hans.
This kind of hilarity is one of the things that keeps me coming back here.
Greg,
I will keep this short. I finally got my vaccine and its quite a wallop. This will be my last reply.
If Africans should:
1) Be judged as individuals
2) Afforded all of the same rights
3) Should be guaranteed a certain standard of living
All of which you have agreed with in the past…
How do you deny them citizenship?
Nationality is as arbitrary and not a result of our individual actions as race, so how do you deny them?
If they stay in Africa, they will no doubt suffer from poverty and some will even die due to lack of resources of medical care. How can you be so cruel?
Not granting them citizenship inevitably means some will suffer and die. So if that’s the worst thing ever, and we have an ethical obligation to devote infinite resources to making that not happen (as you’ve claimed in the past), how do you come to any other conclusion?
“I am saying that when you make judgments about the human worth and character and work ethic of people there is an ethical obligation to judge them by their actions as individuals, not as members of a group”
I’m saying that nobody judges people as individuals. Not completely, not in any context. Getting to know someone as an individual, completely as an individual, requires infinite resources, infinite time, and infinite knowledge. We just try our best given resource constraints and the cost/benefit ratio of additional fine tuning. Harvard doesn’t judge peoples souls, it says “people with this SAT score tend to achieve XYZ on average.” And their SAT score isn’t even something they earned through their own will, it’s just a genetically given like race is. How dare they judge poor SAT score getters! They did nothing to deserve it!
Hans,
I’m mad at a lot of things in the pandemic, and I’m proportionally mad based on the level of imposition. School closings are worse then other impositions, but any impositions that are unjustified are unjustified regardless of the frequency and degree of the imposition.
It’s like taking your shoes off at the airport. It’s not that great an imposition, but it’s dumb and shouldn’t happen. This pandemic is like if I had to deal with the TSA every single day multiple times a day instead of once in awhile when I fly.
I bring this example up for two reasons:
1) To illustrate the utter idiocy of it. There is no reason, at all, for such a policy. So why do I have to put up with it? Whether it’s a small inconvenience, or a big one, of the sum total of impositions big and small, they all have the same useless and counter productive source. I’m not sure why you defend such idiocy?
2) As just one example of how in the COVID era one has to deal with illegitiamate impositions constantly. I’ve never felt the interference of government of the culture wars in my life as I have in the last year. My ability to just say “ignore all that and just live you life” is so much less in this era than anything before it.
I’ve defiantly switched from “outside forces mild annoyance, some cause for concern in long run but whatever” to “I literally can’t imagine a single constraint of what the system can do to me if they felt like it, and the people running it are a mixture of insane, mendacious, and incompetent.” I have no clue if the COVID era will ever end, and if it does will it just periodically re-occur every time some crisis can be manufactured. I never imagined anything this stupid could happen.
asdf,
Wait a minute. You got the vaccine? Seems like only a couple days ago you were outraged it wasn’t being reserved for older people in your dad’s demographic.
Reminds me of this spring when you were telling us the lockdowns were correct and had literally saved your life before you flipped to being outraged that anyone thought they should still exist at all. Your outrage that people could disagree with you is constant even when your positions flip 180 degrees. On the bright side, hopefully this means we won’t have to read every day about how hard this vaccine wait has been for you even as the vast majority of older people still wait for it.
As for immigration, I am getting increasingly bored with responding to your straw men. Just because I think that many Africans “should” be treated better by the people they deal with (including other Africans) does not mean I am obligated to feel they should all be admitted in an open borders policy even if you can’t see the logic in that.
National borders are indeed “arbitrary” in many ways. Even so, they are very real and highly consequential.
>—“Not granting them citizenship inevitably means some will suffer and die. So if that’s the worst thing ever, and we have an ethical obligation to devote infinite resources to making that not happen (as you’ve claimed in the past), how do you come to any other conclusion?”
I never ever claimed anything like that in the past. That’s why you can’t now, and won’t be able in the future, to show where I did that despite the fact that all these comments are preserved on this site.
As someone who’s worked in credit (both individual transaction underwriting and portfolio-level risk management) at small/medium sized banks all my professional life, I concur and think you’ve put it together more concisely than I ever could have.
The OCC’s recent “fairness” rule re: industry credit is an example, although it was later nixed by the Biden admin. The Fed’s commitment toward climate-responsible (?) regulation is another, although we’ll see if anything comes of it.
Interesting that you don’t mention what I would presume is the endgame to such a policy, whether currently contemplated or not, which would be a China-style scoring system that rewards and punishes people based on how much the government likes their behaviors of all kinds, and uses credit scores as a method of social control.
+ 1
Yes, the people who see this is a backdoor grant scheme are forgetting the important part. This is a way to deny credit cards, business loans, etc to the undeserving …
Yes, the people who see this is a backdoor grant scheme are forgetting the important part. This is a way to deny credit cards, business loans, etc to the undeserving …
From social credit score to just credit score.
“they could have the government develop its own credit scoring system”
The problem, from the credit justice warriors’ perspective, would be that creditors probably would ignore the government system in favor of the more accurate private ones, more accurate in the sense of predicting default. As Kling points out, the existing private scores are already accurate: “a low credit score is just as predictive of default for a black person as for a white person”. The article mentions that the current scores are completely race-blind, i.e., non-discriminatory in process: they don’t even look at race. They produce unequal *outcomes*.
This proposal is basically censorship!! Censorship of information produced by current rating agencies about creditworthiness that the credit justice warriors dislike, not because the information is inaccurate, but because they don’t like the outcome. It would be like the government taking over the SAT/ACT so that it could produce racially equalized test scores. (Doh, I hope this analogy doesn’t give justice warriors any ideas!) The 14th Amendment prevents the government from discriminating based on race, but I’m not sure about tinkering with a complicated algorithm to “minimize racial disparities”, i.e., produce racially balanced outcomes. If the tinkering is non-transparent enough, then this might be loophole around the 14th Amendment: produce the same effect as a law requiring that lenders discriminate against racial groups with high credit scores (under the current system) when such a law would surely be unconstitutional.
This idea is so pernicious. If one wants to argue for some sort of affirmative action in lending, or some sort of “holistic” credit evaluation that considers more than just raw credit scores, that’s one thing. But, these justice warriors want to just straight out eliminate, i.e., censor, race-blind scores so that we can’t even debate affirmative action. If they are successful, censorship of race-blind college admissions test scores and many other race-blind evaluations are sure to follow. In fact, the whole notion that race-blind and gender-blind AI — artificial intelligence algorithms that exclude race and gender as inputs — must be monitored for racial and gender “bias” in outcomes can be viewed as a pre-emptive strike against future race-blind and gender-blind scoring of all types.
Just make it illegal to share information that doesn’t fit the government system; and put commissars in every place where it might be communicated.
Don’t imagine it can’t happen.
Another point: recently one of the major credit-rating companies was hacked. The hack was announced and, I trust, repaired. In the breach there were two other agencies available. But recently many US agencies were hacked. My experience of government-run websites is that they are perhaps a decade behind the private sector in speed, function, and reliability. For example, on the first business day of the year the Multnomah County (OR) court documents search was down for “maintenance.” It stayed down for a week. Now imagine that you do not have three privately-controlled, publicly-accountable agencies, but one government-run, unaccountable agency running on decades-old computer equipment and software. You could wait weeks for credit data. Leaks would be rampant; some would be politically motivated. Foreign governments might have access to all of everyone’s personal financial data. No thanks.
One of the Big Lies – US Black American culture raises Blacks to be equally trustworthy as Whites. Anybody who denies this “truth” is a racist.
And should be punished.
But the tribal equality claim is not true – yet on an individual level, many responsible Blacks can and do have higher, or much higher, credit scores than the many millions of irresponsible Whites.
Credit score is a proxy for “irresponsible” – those with lower credit scores have been more irresponsible in the decisions they’ve made in their lives.
More Blacks, proportionally tho not absolutely, choose to be criminals, and choose to be an unmarried parent. Especially choosing to commit crimes is clearly irresponsible. Credit scores show this accurately.
SJWs view accurate reality as “oppressive” – so prefer an inaccurate reality.
OT from credit, but very apropros of the title “Smug and Stupid”.
NYT has admitted it printed a
lieuntruth in their prior coverage of the fire extinguisher caused death of Police Officer Sicknick.Neo has details:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/02/15/officer-sicknicks-death-the-only-surprise-here-is-that-the-ny-times-actually-issued-any-sort-of-retraction-at-all-even-a-mild-one/
Many, like often honest but Trump-disapproving Andrew McCarthy, were sort of “happy” to blame Trump, and Trump supporters, for the death, and believed the NYT false report based on unnamed “officials”.
The Dem media has long been feeding the public horse manure untruths from “officials”, and I expect that to continue. What honest people need to do is suspect EVERY anonymous “official” who says something bad about Reps to be incompletely truthful, if not false.