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Comment by worrycue | Hacker News Reader

Your credit score just measures your reliability in repaying loans no? It only affects your ability to get loans no?

It’s no different from a driving test which measures you ability to drive and only affects your eligibility to drive.

We use such specialised tests with clear “passing” conditions that only affect a specific part of our lives all the time.

Social credit systems seem far more far reaching from what I have heard - affects your ability to get loans, buy property, travel, … etc. Your score also depends on pleasing certain people in society rather meeting some objective criteria - reminds me of the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”.

Don’t think they are really comparable.

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I feel like you're really downplaying how impactful credit score is and how dystopian it is. They rebranded fraud against the lender as "identity theft" against you so that they could sell your fraudulent debt to private harassment firms. In turn since identity theft isn't real (fraud is) you need to get the lender to file a police report and unseal their private financial records (they won't do this). All this while you experience real damages like being rejected by mainstream lenders, swaths of employment and housing opportunities and pushed towards fringe and predatory lenders.

That being said, I also think you're not accurately describing social credit or relying entirely on hearsay. For the most part its focused around credit worthiness and financial fraud. I'm not a huge fan of either system, but as somebody who's worked with people harmed by the US private credit system, I can tell you that it's possible to "Nosedive" here and that's not just what I've heard.

> It only affects your ability to get loans no?

Not in the US. It also affects your ability to get housing, to get jobs, and other things.

> More than half of employers conduct background checks during the hiring process only, and the No. 1 reason (at 86%) is to protect their employees and customers, says the 2018 HR.com report.[0]

> Landlords generally look for a credit score of 650 or above to approve a rental application.[1]

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/select/can-employers-see-your-credit-sc...

[1]https://www.apartmentlist.com/renter-life/credit-score-neede...

> Social credit systems seem far more far reaching from what I have heard - affects your ability to get loans, buy property, travel, … etc. Your score also depends on pleasing certain people in society rather meeting some objective criteria - reminds me of the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive”.

This is the way the media covered it, but PolyMatter recently did a video that goes a long way toward clarifying what Social Credit means [0]. The short version is that it's a collection of barely-related initiatives and companies responsible for a lot of different things, that in Western eyes all got lumped together into a monolothic version that encompasses every aspect of life.

PolyMatter has a lot of good content on China. They're highly critical of China's policies, but they have a very realistic perspective on China's quite limited capabilities as an enormous, diverse, authoritarian state. My main takeaway from their China content is that China's ability to micromanage is dramatically overestimated in Western pop culture. Not that their regime is less oppressive than we think, just vastly less competent.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqov6F00KMc

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