No there is a major difference when social credit is centralized to a single authority , and people cannot use the law to protect from that authority.
otherwise, people have always judged each other with any way they could
otherwise, people have always judged each other with any way they could
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
It is a fundamentally flawed comparison.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.
China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough. But a single national system never emerged.
There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.
China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.
Kind of like rural Alabama.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-an...
The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:
You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
oh yeah and whos guaranteeing borrowers for these banks? source would be nice but I bet you dont reply
To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.
In this case a corporation is judging me and then offering those judgments as a service.
Quite a difference.
The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.
But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
Unless you guys start accepting that and find an alternative solution or system, you'll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole you're in. More debt, more wars, more homelessness, more crime, and no future.
I'm aware there are more than exactly 2 parties in the ballots in many western countries. It's not about the numbers, but whether any of those choices really give the people real alternatives, or just different ways to screw the majority of the people.
As you can probably can see from the above interaction, people resort very quickly to ad hominem attacks.
Edit: I might be another troll, but from last few elections I don’t feel any progress. As an engineer I see continuous offshoring of well paid positions to cheaper EU countries. As self employed electrician I see regulatory and tax madness.
You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
Address the argument rather than engaging in ad hominem.
There are total nutjobs of all walks that are living just fine. There are actual Nazis and commies living just fine.
It's a big country. If our whole society already has dystopian social credit it should be easy to find examples.
Stop right there, then you'll see them :) Millions of them
You have tons of meaningful economic choices everywhere in American life. You can bank with any bank and look for competing offers for credit to do useful things. For example you can buy a home and shop for a better interest rate by taking an offer for a loan from one lender to another and 9 times out of 10 you'll come away with a better offer. But you can easily not take on a loan and choose to preference flexibility and therefore rent. This housing choice involves a myriad of sub choices about lifestyle, commuting preferences, school adjacency, and other elements you may want to balance. Because US state are often quite different in character and economic and social opportunity you have a ton of dimension along which you can exercise choice.
Someone posting here likely has access to remote work and can meaningfully choose to live in a quite mountain town in West Virginia with satellite internet where you never see more than a few people every week, or you could live in a mid sized city like I do and get involved in neighborhood organizations. Similarly you could move to NYC and live in a small apartment an spend all of your time going out to bars and restaurants. These are SUPER meaningful choices on an individual level.
I've literally never heard of this.
> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?
All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.