this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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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:
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.