603
TIL personal credit scores only started in 1989
(en.m.wikipedia.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
603 points (97.3% liked)
Today I Learned
17858 readers
1 users here now
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It sucks but things were worse before, especially if you were black.
Or an immigrant. Or a woman (especially if you're pregnant). Or if you lived near black people or immigrants. Or if you had long hair. Or maybe the local bank manager just didn't like you. These were all acceptable reasons to deny your loan application prior to credit scores.
They literally made decisions based on things you can't control. Banks are now legally prohibited from even asking these things. If you notice, people working at a bank will never ask "where are you from?"
Fuck I sound like a bootlicker but the net result was that it took away some control of the rich to influence social mobility.
But rich people are living organisms and their think tanks are the smartest. They’ve already found ways around it.
As time moves on, a lot of things containing racial bias have gotten more abstract. For example, we don't segregate schools by law anymore, but African-Americans do tend to live in neighborhoods together, those neighborhoods tend to have lower property values, and schools are funded by the taxes on property values. Segregation is still there, but you have to go a few layers deep to find it.
However, as its been forced to get more abstract, it's also become less effective. Without absolute prohibitions against African-Americans attending the same schools as white people, there has been more upwards mobility of African-Americans to live in better neighborhoods with better schools and end cycles of poverty. Still, it would be better if we got rid of this dumb property tax system for schools altogether.
Credit scores are the same. It abstracted away the racism. It's still there, causing unnecessary hardship, but not to the degree previous systems did. There is more room for upwards mobility, but that doesn't mean we should leave it as it is.
That's highly debatable. There are definitely some groups of African Americans who have cracked the glass ceiling. But on average, black household wealth has significantly lagged white wealth accumulation year-over-year. Case in point, the '08 crash decimated black households to the tune of 40% of their total accumulated savings. The COVID crisis saw higher rates of mortality in black communities, as well as higher rates of unemployment, of declines in school completion rates (from high school up through graduate programs), and of divorce. All negatively correlated with wealth accumulation.
Maybe since '89 things have improved. But the last two decades have sucked and African Americans have eaten disproportionate amounts of shit during it.
Came here to say this. Credit scores are meant to remove some of the racial and social bias from the decision making. That was the idea anyway.
Doesn't mean this is how it has to be. It can be improved further.
While true, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yes, and I'm only making the opposite counter-point: Don't stop doing a good thing, like fixing broken systems.
I love it how everyone enjoys pointing out the negative interpretation when it's in response to something that makes it utterly clear I mean the positive interpretation.
You may as well be saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", which I'm sure is not what you mean, but that's exactly what responding with a counter-view implies at this point.
How can it be improved further. If you're going to say stuff, give us a "such as," otherwise it comes off as a negative, it's not good enough. Gotta be constructive with the criticism. I'm reading a lot of negative reactions and I want some actual rationale for it, because I guess I'm uneducated on the topic and I fail to see what the issue is. Credit is people giving you money. There's a system that keeps track of your credit history. Don't want it? Don't get credit, that's it. Have 0 credit and then reap the rewards of that if you want.
Such as if you've been paying rent for years you should be allowed to pay an equal amount for a home you may actually own one day. That's my main one.
I don't understand what you mean or how that relates at all. And I'm not trying to be obtuse, I just don't see a rational nexus between what you're paying in rent now versus what you may pay as a mortgage on some completely different piece of property. Owning a piece of property and renting one are two different things.
Now, should paying rent be reflected on your credit score? I believe so, for better and for worse. If you are a good tenant, always pay rent on time, to me that reflects well on your fiscal health. I think the only reason it's not is because who is there to report it? Only way it would be is if you could put it on your credit card, and I'm not sure any landlords take credit cards.
Mass incarceration in the modern era makes that a hard comparison to square up.
Are you better off today as a middle class black suburbanite throwing a third of your paycheck at a subprime loan for a house you couldn't even legally own 40 years ago? Yeah, sure, I guess.
Are you better off today as a teenager in a Texas supermax prison without working A/C, working 12 hour shifts for less than a dollar an hour, while the state government frets that there aren't enough people like you to meet some arbitrary imprisonment quota? Doubtful.
Post-Reagan, society has been a decided mixed black for African Americans.