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Notes -
On Credit Scores
I stumbled across this voxplainer on pocket: https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/12/14/24000469/what-does-credit-score-mean, and it reminded me of the Biden admin rule increasing the fees on mortgages to borrowers with good credit(https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3978409-why-is-the-biden-administration-punishing-financially-responsible-homeowners/), and I think that at the time the justification was some kind of racial justice angle. And that in turn led me to think "golly willikers, people are going to start fighting each other over credit scores, might as well get ahead of it on the motte". (If you're not familiar with how credit scores work for some reason, here's an advertisement for a credit scoring company that explains pretty well: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/credit-education/score-basics/understanding-credit-scores/).
Well not really, I'm not a 50's comic book character. But it seems odd in retrospect that we didn't have a motte discussion in April/May about the change in fee structure, and it seems like there is or is about to be a woke push to try to adjust credit scoring for equity reasons, and this is the kind of boring economic mismanagement that can really jack up the economy if it happens. Now most of the things vox suggests are anodyne if probably stupid and mildly negative, but it's easy to see a jump to government rules getting a whole lot stupider and more destructive; the whole sector is very heavily regulated.
Now a personal story- when I was much younger, I needed to buy a car because the beatermobile I had was broken down and I lived too far from work to walk(and in Tarrant county, there is no public transportation to speak of), and I decided I might as well buy something good that would last a while, even if I had to borrow for it, in lieu of buying another craigslist beatermobile that I'd have to replace in a year or two. I found a good gently used truck online, it was a good deal... and I got denied financing because of lack of credit history. But, my dad put it in his name and told me to get a credit card with a major bank and pay off the full amount on autopay so we didn't have to do that again. I'm still driving that truck and haven't had to spend any money on repairs in five years except new tires(because there was something in the road) and a battery(which was cheap), and I have good credit and don't need my parents to cosign loans. But I can easily imagine if I'd been estranged, didn't know who my dad was, just had parents who were financially illiterate/had bad credit(but I repeat), whatever. I would have had to buy a beatermobile, spend as much on mechanical repairs as I did on buying it, and then buy another beatermobile and do the same thing. And I wouldn't have been able to buy a house; I'd have been stuck in flophouses or the kind of apartments that don't bother to have an English language application because it's all illegal immigrants. So I can kind of see vox's point- there really are people with generational advantages(I'm one of them), although I don't think most of it is an aftereffect of 50s racism(it's mostly just lack of impulse control) some people get the short end of the stick. Most of them would probably still be behind if we had a level playing field, sure, but we don't- something as simple as "your parents can give good advice" is a major advantage, and it correlates with being the sort of person who would figure out how to have a good credit score anyways, but it's not a perfect correlation.
And for a lot of reasons, people who lack those major advantages are disproportionately black, and this isn't fixable. I happen to hold the belief that we shouldn't try very hard because of omelets, eggs, and the history of ideologically-driven progressive interventions in the economy. Current credit scoring is probably about as fair as can reasonably be expected(which is not perfectly fair). Adding financial literacy classes to high school curricula might be good, but let's be real, the kids who need the instruction aren't learning anyways. I don't think there's much to be done about it, and credit scoring formulae do what they're intended to do, which is accurately reflect creditworthiness.
However, it does not seem to me like people holding the opposite view are obviously delusional the same way as progressive attitudes towards crime are. Some people, through no fault of their own, are bad credit risks, and there really are things that don't get reported to credit agencies which probably should so some people who are good credit risks lack sufficient history for a credit score. And so we can probably expect the "we should do something to make credit scores more equitable" idea to survive the backlash against woke. Vox mentioned multiple states banning the use of credit scores in making insurance decisions; I don't support this, but it's perfectly understandable to me that some people would even if I disagree with them. It seems like this is an underrated aspect of wokeness which will probably survive and where the woke have the potential to do real damage. The Biden admin rule above I don't expect to have good results, but it also seems like something with a pretty minor impact, but which is also the tip of the iceberg. Which raises the question: what else might a woke federal government do to try to hamfistedly improve "equity" in this area?
No, but they're still wrong. If they were correct, one would expect blacks to have a lower default rate, given their credit score, than whites. This is not the case.
Well yes, blacks have lower credit scores because they’re worse with credit, and they’re worse with credit for the usual reasons. But ‘blacks lack advantages that most whites have and that’s the main reason for lower credit scores’ isn’t just laughably wrong or insane- it’s totally a thing that could happen. We just don’t live in the world where it does, and it’s a hard assertion to disprove without crimethink.
"Not laughably wrong or insane" is simply not sufficient reason to believe the story. There's always some just-so story as to why some progressive-favored group is actually doing worse through something that's actually the fault of the evil white male or society or anything other than their own. And every time people come up with evidence that casts doubt on the just-so story, the just-so story just moves into any remaining gaps. And/or the evidence is suppressed.
Blacks have lower credit scores because they engage in activities that result in lower credit scores. Furthermore, black credit scores either correctly reflect or underestimate their credit risk. There's nothing to correct or compensate for, except on the part of black people themselves.
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