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.