No there is a major difference when social credit is centralized to a single authority , and people cannot use the law to protect from that authority.
otherwise, people have always judged each other with any way they could
No there is a major difference when social credit is centralized to a single authority , and people cannot use the law to protect from that authority.
otherwise, people have always judged each other with any way they could
Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:
You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
> The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
oh yeah and whos guaranteeing borrowers for these banks? source would be nice but I bet you dont reply
> I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.
If your borrow money and give it to someone else and that someone else loses it how is it the borrower's fault or even problem?
It's not the borrowers fault, and in case of banks, it's not even their problem thanks to credit score and extensive guarantees built into the system.
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Sorry I meant lender.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
Overview from 2022. One city really did set up a full social credit system, but that was a pilot project and didn't work out.[1] There are some private "social credit" systems, like the one from Ant, but that's more like a rewards program - buy stuff, get points.
China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough. But a single national system never emerged.
There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.
China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.
Kind of like rural Alabama.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-an...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang%27an
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
It might be used to deny your kid a college loan, though - which might work out the same as denying them higher education.
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.
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!
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.
>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.
But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we? A highly contentious normative claim has little to do with OP's argument and is obviously not a basis for a rebuttal for distinctiying the two systems. Which I would imagine there is a certain intentionality in reaching for highly contrived arguments based on literal hypotheticals rather than accurate description of reality.
> But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we?
Yes, we are. "Your credit score is social credit." is the first sentence in the original post.
If you want to reject the entire premise of this article/blog post, thats your prerogative, but it's really not that different.
>Yes, we are.
That's what I'm saying here. You're the one who's making strange tangents here to try to rebutt OP.
>but it's really not that different.
No it's not. Because others are explaining why the premise is wrong. You using the normative assumption that "university should accessible" to conflate credit scores with the descriptive reality of social credit.
That first assumption is just an opinion that far from everyone holds, and you can effectively construct hypothetical that credit scores would fail to reach to justify your point. That's not good debate, and I'd be be curious to see what dosent count as "social credit" here.
I don't believe that simply because of the predatory nature of student loans. They'll give them to literally anyone.
In US they have just one more party than in China. Also 1 person is not automatically 1 vote.
"The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." -- Julius Nyerere
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.
In effect, the difference is much less than you imply.
Of course individual people judge each other.
In this case a corporation is judging me and then offering those judgments as a service.
Quite a difference.
Exactly. Amazon might approve my returns (or not cancel my account) because I buy more than someone else, but they don't share my purchase/return ratio with any third parties.
You didn’t read the article. There is no single authority social credit system in China.
Exactly. Unless all these companies are sharing trustworthiness data I can make a new account and start fresh. The centralization of "worthiness" is what concerns me.
How do I make new Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax account to reset my credit score?
Declare bankruptcy and wait 5 or 10 years.
If you are doing any sort of financial transactions you will likely need a new debit/credit card.
And hopefully you've not done anything that is "problematic" there, or ChexSystems will be along to make sure your new bank might want to know not to do business with you, like they did to me, after KeyBank tried to hit me with $405 in overdraft fees in a single day for a series of transactions that, if played chronologically, would never had had me with a balance below $0 at any point, due to "transaction reordering". Chex refused to remove the derogatory note, even after there was a lawsuit and legislation, until I kept escalating with them.
Once a single authority controls the "score," though, it stops being just social feedback and becomes structural power
Those "single authorities" you fear already exist in western countries, the mega-corporations that monopolise entire markets.
The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.
But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You describe a real problem and an attack vector on democracy that is being used. However you make it sound like everything is already lost when it certainly isn’t.
Thinking of it as an attack vector is the problem with people. I'm saying what you have isn't democracy. Your market isn't free. Voting between the same 2 parties or choosing to buy/rent from the same few mega corporations aren't real choices.
Unless you guys start accepting that and find an alternative solution or system, you'll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole you're in. More debt, more wars, more homelessness, more crime, and no future.
I don't know where you are from (I'm really curious though), but where I live there are more than two political parties and more than a few mega corporations to buy or rent from. You seem to have an extremely distorted idea of what live is like in "western countries".
Can you please share your country of residence? Because in Germany I really don’t feel the choice. There are few political parties, but I don’t feel this variety helps in any way. There are few mega corporations for everything else, just check the list of richest germans.
Edit: I might be another troll, but from last few elections I don’t feel any progress. As an engineer I see continuous offshoring of well paid positions to cheaper EU countries. As self employed electrician I see regulatory and tax madness.
I lived in the UK for 10 years, I've also lived in a number of other countries, from democracies, communist (Vietnam), and varying degrees of democratic and economic freedoms.
I'm aware there are more than exactly 2 parties in the ballots in many western countries. It's not about the numbers, but whether any of those choices really give the people real alternatives, or just different ways to screw the majority of the people.
As you can probably can see from the above interaction, people resort very quickly to ad hominem attacks.
> But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
> You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
Address the argument rather than engaging in ad hominem.
It really isn't an argument.
You have tons of meaningful economic choices everywhere in American life. You can bank with any bank and look for competing offers for credit to do useful things. For example you can buy a home and shop for a better interest rate by taking an offer for a loan from one lender to another and 9 times out of 10 you'll come away with a better offer. But you can easily not take on a loan and choose to preference flexibility and therefore rent. This housing choice involves a myriad of sub choices about lifestyle, commuting preferences, school adjacency, and other elements you may want to balance. Because US state are often quite different in character and economic and social opportunity you have a ton of dimension along which you can exercise choice.
Someone posting here likely has access to remote work and can meaningfully choose to live in a quite mountain town in West Virginia with satellite internet where you never see more than a few people every week, or you could live in a mid sized city like I do and get involved in neighborhood organizations. Similarly you could move to NYC and live in a small apartment an spend all of your time going out to bars and restaurants. These are SUPER meaningful choices on an individual level.
Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights? Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
> Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
I've literally never heard of this.
> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?
All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.
I've been renting for 20 years and only ever had an inspection once.
Show me the Americans stuck in a black hole where nobody processes their payment, banks won't handle their money, they can't vote, they can't travel, etc. because of their deviations?
There are total nutjobs of all walks that are living just fine. There are actual Nazis and commies living just fine.
It's a big country. If our whole society already has dystopian social credit it should be easy to find examples.
Banks talk to each other via ChexSystems/EWS and stick Americans in a black hole where nobody processes their payments and banks won't handle their money. Felons don't have voting rights in 48 states. As far as travel is concerned, being imprisoned makes that hard, but no, we don't (yet) have internal border checks that prevent people from moving from place to place, other than the fact that it's expensive.
Go into a busy gas station in the US. Ask "Hey, is anybody here a felon?" (Doesn't matter if customer or if they're working there)
Only about 6% of Americans have felony records as of 2023.
That's a lot, about 2025 million people! And while many felons deserve their prison terms, those who have been released have an extremely steep hill to climb to get functional in society again. I feel like there's probably some correlation with recidivism rates.
That should be 20-25, not 2025.
So over 20,000,000 people.
> Show me the Americans stuck in a black hole
Stop right there, then you'll see them :) Millions of them