Also, your credit score drops if you pay all your debts

And didnt exist until 1989 in the US. Credit scores and Tay Tay are the same age.

However if you were a minority or a woman it was also a removed to get a loan prior to it. Though women could even have their own bank accounts till… the 60s/70s?
- Women earned the right in the 60s, but it wasn't until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in '74 until banks were forbidden from requiring a husband's signature.
  The Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibits financial institutions from discriminating against applicants based on their sex, age, marital status, religion, race or national origin.
  https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/when-could-women-open-a-bank-account/
  I worked for a Credit Union as a developer. I can attest that at least where I worked, there was a host of yearly modules you had to complete to ensure you were up to speed on how to not be an asshole and they took it quite seriously.
- Really? In my country, women can still have their own bank account
Sorry, but Tay Zonday was born in '82, so predates the credit score. (There's only one Tay Tay for me and it's Zonday)
- ...TIL he's older than me. What a wild world. He looked he was in high school when he went viral.
Credit reporting has been a thing prior to that, but yeah, scores are relatively new.

fun fact, neither is the social credit they complained that china had, but the western credit score is basically a social credit that punish people for not consuming beyond their means.

China social credit started out as something like a credit score where you would get beneficial services/rates with a better score from lenders such as Sesame Credit.
The government took that and applied it to many spheres of the society in a pilot program. I don't know how it is today since I haven't looked into that since 2019.
So when you have some car insurers, for example, that offer to put a gps device in your car in exchange for better rates, this is how the social credit system started through private companies.
You can raise it well without going beyond your means, but then it's a slow and annoying racket.
- hard disagree.
  a perfectly responsible person would only buy things he can afford. his credit score would be non existent.
  you only get it if you have debts, if you finish paying your debts the score goes down, so you have to consume to maintain it.
  also, a perfect score isn't ideal. lenders are more interested in loaning to people who will fail some payments, as that means higher interest and more profit.
  so you are punished by not overconsuming, and you are punished if you consume and are perfectly responsible.
  
  I've made it to what is typically classified as an "excellent" score with practically no debt and have paid no interest all while spending within my means. Here's how I did it.
  I have several credit cards that I keep paid off every month. I almost always buy things with store promotion credit (no fees or interest), which is typically another credit card or small loan, and pay it off within the promotional period. I do this with purchases I need to make anyway, like a washing machine, and not on anything frivolous.
  I paid all expenses for a nice vacation recently with new travel cards. I could have paid out of pocket, but now I can pay it off slowly with 18 months interest free and get the points.
  I do drag these payments out a little during the promotional periods because while I can pay outright I do like keeping cash reserves for emergencies. That probably does help.
  The only loan I have ever had was a very very small student loan. Paid that immediately after covid loan pauses ended. I did recieve a credit hit of about -20, but in 3ish months I was above where I started. I've noticed everytime I pay off any large credit it takes an immediate hit, but always grows higher in a few months.
  So far I've not been denied on any credit I've accessed and typically get good terms, so I'm not sure how true it is that I'll be denied for having a good score. But I am just barely at that "excellent" score.
  Now the downside and credit to your point is this took a very long time. If I bought a ton of things I could barely afford and just barely made payments, maybe even missed a few, my score would have grown so much faster. Paying on an irresponsible loan for 5 years is considered "better" than me paying my credit card off every month.
  Imo that's the racket, people that spend irresponsibly grow their score much faster. It does indeed promote overconsumption.
  But it is still possible to grow a good credit score with slow incremental work. It's unfair and a bad system. I'd rather not have to do any of this, but it's possible.
  
  what you described is a fucking nightmare of a system. so painfully convoluted and unfair, and the only one who wins is the shareholders because of all the consumption.
  
  Pretty much yeah, but until my fellow citizens wake the fuck up I still gotta access the system to live unfortunately

It's reasonably common in the developed world. And it's a good idea that lenders be able to easily know how responsible borrowers are with repayment. That the US' implementation of credit scores is problematic in some areas shouldn't be used as a blanket dismissal of a credit scoring system.

The US credit score system is from the 60's. Things worked just as well before it existed...
- This is technically true but extremely deceptive if you don't know the history. From "Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America" (Lauer, 2017; Columbia University Press):
  Chapter 3: "By the late 1890s systems for evaluating the credit risk of individual consumers existed in metropolitan centers throughout the United States."
  Chapter 4: "During the early twentieth century millions of Americans came under the watchful gaze of newly formed credit bureaus. But these bureaus were only one arm of the emergent consumer credit apparatus. Their counterpart was the credit department of individual stores, where credit managers interviewed, documented, and tracked customers for their own benefit and that of the local bureau."
  Credit reporting has existed for a very long time in the US. So while a computerized score wasn't there until the late 1950s (basically as soon as such a computerized score could exist, underscoring how eager banks were to implement it), your comment being technically true has no real impact on the argument of the merits of credit scoring.
  
  From Wikipedia about the history of Equifax:
  Equifax was founded as the Retail Credit Company by Cator and Guy Woolford in Atlanta, Georgia, as Retail Credit Company in 1899. By 1920, the company had offices throughout the United States and Canada. By the 1960s, Retail Credit Company was one of the nation's largest credit bureaus, holding files on millions of American and Canadian citizens. Even though the company continued to do credit reporting, the majority of its business was making reports to insurance companies when people applied for new insurance policies, such as life, auto, fire and medical insurance. RCC also investigated insurance claims and made employment reports when people were seeking new jobs. Most of the credit work was then being done by a subsidiary, Retailers Commercial Agency.
  People latch onto the fact that credit scores were invented and ignore decades of credit reporting prior.
- before, bankers used other ways to discriminate, such as (and if you know anything about US history this should not be a surprise) being Black.
  not to defend credit scores. they suck. but what existed before sucked too and we shouldn’t go back to them.
  
  Redlining still happens today. They just discriminate in more ways now.
- I didn't think it started in the US until the late 80's.
  
  The modern version we know is from the late 80s.
i think that article describes many different systems and grouping them under a concept that's not necessarily related. the us system is definitely an odd man out.
- How so? They all seem to be used for estimating risk when pricing a loan and are based on financial history.
  
  the big difference i can see is that most systems described seem binary. if you don't pay your debs, you get a strike. the american system, as i had it explained to me, is based on cash flow, so you need to have debts to pay in order to get a good score.
  
  Most of them mention a range of scores. China and India use scores which by themselves give about 3 billion people with credit scores based on statistical modeling.
  A lack of cash flow is a lack of financial history which makes one less predictable and therefore riskier which lowers your score.
  
  Not unique to the US, we have the same thing here in Canada
  
  the uk also has something similar. which makes sense.
  
  They want an established history showing you pay things you've agreed to pay. I've never made a lot of income, but I've always paid my bills on time, so even with a smaller cash flow I still have great records of always making sure I have enough to pay what I'm expected to pay, so I'm seen as reliable to any possible debtors.