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Garson O’Toole, Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations: Collection of investigations into the actual provenance of often misattributed quotes, including some search for their predecessors.
Rachel Sherman, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence: Sherman interviewed a number of wealthy New Yorkers about how they thought about the getting and spending of money. Many were politically liberal, some conservative (at least when it came to taxes), but they all wanted to avoid being seen as “entitled.” Proper attitudes towards money required respect for hard work, avoiding being a showoff (which meant that you didn’t brag about the second home in the Hamptons, not that you didn’t have it), and an attitude of gratitude for the opportunities one had been afforded, whether through inheritance or otherwise. Many of them didn’t like the language of desert, though they also thought they (or someone to whom they were connected) had earned the money. Sherman seems a bit ideologically confused herself; she concludes that these attitudes largely suppress discussion of inequality and make it easier to ignore the ways in which other people work as hard/harder for less, but her big point is that inequality is structural. If all her interviewees gave away all their money, the structures wouldn’t change—though query if the same could be said if they used their money for political donations (they still wouldn’t be able to match the Kochs, though). I also really wonder whether she’d find the same ways of thinking/talking about money among rich people in, say, Oklahoma City—both in terms of what she calls “downward-oriented” people (usually liberal, hyperaware of what they have that others don’t) and “upward-oriented” people (the ones who say they’re not that rich, really, because they still fly first class most of the time, more likely to be conservative).
Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America: Very interesting book demonstrating that lots of business practices of collecting private data and using it for financial benefit we think of as new has roots a century and a half old, albeit with less well organized technologies. Credit based on assessment of moral characteristics and behavior, its proponents said, was necessary to allow people without capital to take risks and make it big, in contrast to corrupt European aristocrats where access to credit relied on capital reserves. With the decline of trust and personal relationships in a larger commercial economy, credit reporting was a way of replacing those guarantors of good behavior, first by the credit bureau’s own personal knowledge/knowledge attained from local merchants and later from more formalized statistics. Some resisted this “espionage”; libel suits were always a threat.
The credit reporting industry was fragmented until the 1980s, enabling the more pervasive surveillance of today, but the old surveillance tried for comprehensiveness and had some sophisticated features, including targeting those who showed up as good risks for more offers of credit by the 1920s. Nineteenth-century sellers were just as aware as those today that offering credit makes buyers spend more liberally. At the same time, many retailers really wanted cash only policies, because of the risks of extending credit; the ability to extend credit and take a few losses along the way provided larger businesses with a comparative advantage, and retail credit management was intimately connected to the rise of department stores. By the 1930s, stores were studying good customers’ habits and sending them letters directing them to departments they might’ve overlooked—a way, Lauer argues, of restoring personalization to what had become impersonal relationships, but without needing a helpful clerk on the seller’s end. Which sounds a lot like today’s automated targeting, too.
Creditors’ and potential creditors’ intrusions into privacy were justified because of the moral claim of the creditor against a debtor. And the absence of consumer resistance to these privacy intrusions then, as now, “baffled credit bureau officials and credit managers,” especially given business resistance to disclosing similar information in the nineteenth century for business-to-business credit purposes. While many consumers resisted disclosing negative information in personal interviews, they’d tell a lot more to an impersonal form.
Credit bureaus also evaluated creditworthiness and classified people by relative risks, almost from their inception—creditworthiness isn’t as much about ability to pay as it is about readiness to pay. “Since wealth ensured nothing and character was a variable impossible to isolate or measure systematically, credit professionals turned to other metrics to predict trustworthiness.” Occupation was a primary one—teachers good, policemen and firemen not so much because “they feel that the public is under obligation to them and hence they take all the time they want to pay their debts.” Race (and nationality, determined by checking the applicant’s first name) was another standard means of classification.
Formalization came as part of the 19th century vogue for statistics and accounting; it was supposed to make differently worded, qualitative reports of reputation more reliable and comparable. Ratings came from no one in particular and appeared objective. Similarly, installment contracts with standardized wording displaced informal credit relationships between local retailers and trusted customers. Later, information culled from sources like newspaper clippings was dropped from credit reports as statistical credit scoring emerged, relying on preselected categories and not trying to get “a full picture” of the individual consumer. Social and economic stability—having a telephone in the house, having a savings account—could be measured directly where character could not. Quantifying credit risk also allowed lenders to begin experimenting with variable interest rates, so even late-paying customers could be made profitable. Early statistical systems, unsurprisingly, were distrusted by experienced “credit men” (and sometimes women), but there just weren’t enough of those trained professionals to cope with the exploding demand for credit. Credit scoring promised to reduce subjectivity and bias, even as it encoded the larger effects of bias into credit scores: “statistical credit scoring could not end discrimination by excluding superficial personal characteristics because gender and racial inequalities were woven directly into the fabric of American society.”
Local data often outstripped the information available to the (much smaller) state, and the FBI and IRS, among others, turned to credit bureaus for help. Lauer also discusses the self that credit reporting tried to construct: one engaged in monitoring itself-as-consumer, especially its capacity for repayment of debt. And creditworthiness is a moral judgment too; consumers’ beliefs in its morality helps get them to pay. Or at least, the professionals Lauer studied believed that—he points out that his focus on their justifications and practices doesn’t say much about what credit evaluation was like for consumers.
As it turned out, the free market alone didn’t drive the adoption of statistical credit scoring. Lauer points to government antidiscrimination mandates in the 1970s—which, perhaps ironically, drove the practice of using “impersonal” statistical pools to avoid charges of deliberate discrimination—as well as to Fannie and Freddie, which wanted to be able to compare scores of mortgagors in guaranteeing home loans in the 1990s. These government mandates forced previously diffuse sources of credit scoring to come together. But now we have new risk models for everything—whether someone will pay their gas bill may not be the same as whether they’ll pay their phone bill. Coming on the heels of the Equifax breach, Lauer offers a timely reminder that the system has now shifted to consumers the responsibility not only of monitoring their own credit-related behavior but also the responsibility of monitoring their own credit reports.
Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics: New York in the seventies came close to economic collapse. The popular diagnosis was that it spent too much on city services: free college, hospitals, child care, good union jobs for city workers in all those places as well as police and firefighters, welfare for the unemployed. However, Phillips-Fein argues that New York suffered not just because it was generous but because the rest of the country was stingy, engaging in policies that encouraged white flight and diminished the tax base. When the crisis peaked because banks would no longer lend and Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead, business leaders were able to take control under the claim “there is no alternative.” Thus austerity politics came to New York, and to the country.
Rachel Sherman, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence: Sherman interviewed a number of wealthy New Yorkers about how they thought about the getting and spending of money. Many were politically liberal, some conservative (at least when it came to taxes), but they all wanted to avoid being seen as “entitled.” Proper attitudes towards money required respect for hard work, avoiding being a showoff (which meant that you didn’t brag about the second home in the Hamptons, not that you didn’t have it), and an attitude of gratitude for the opportunities one had been afforded, whether through inheritance or otherwise. Many of them didn’t like the language of desert, though they also thought they (or someone to whom they were connected) had earned the money. Sherman seems a bit ideologically confused herself; she concludes that these attitudes largely suppress discussion of inequality and make it easier to ignore the ways in which other people work as hard/harder for less, but her big point is that inequality is structural. If all her interviewees gave away all their money, the structures wouldn’t change—though query if the same could be said if they used their money for political donations (they still wouldn’t be able to match the Kochs, though). I also really wonder whether she’d find the same ways of thinking/talking about money among rich people in, say, Oklahoma City—both in terms of what she calls “downward-oriented” people (usually liberal, hyperaware of what they have that others don’t) and “upward-oriented” people (the ones who say they’re not that rich, really, because they still fly first class most of the time, more likely to be conservative).
Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America: Very interesting book demonstrating that lots of business practices of collecting private data and using it for financial benefit we think of as new has roots a century and a half old, albeit with less well organized technologies. Credit based on assessment of moral characteristics and behavior, its proponents said, was necessary to allow people without capital to take risks and make it big, in contrast to corrupt European aristocrats where access to credit relied on capital reserves. With the decline of trust and personal relationships in a larger commercial economy, credit reporting was a way of replacing those guarantors of good behavior, first by the credit bureau’s own personal knowledge/knowledge attained from local merchants and later from more formalized statistics. Some resisted this “espionage”; libel suits were always a threat.
The credit reporting industry was fragmented until the 1980s, enabling the more pervasive surveillance of today, but the old surveillance tried for comprehensiveness and had some sophisticated features, including targeting those who showed up as good risks for more offers of credit by the 1920s. Nineteenth-century sellers were just as aware as those today that offering credit makes buyers spend more liberally. At the same time, many retailers really wanted cash only policies, because of the risks of extending credit; the ability to extend credit and take a few losses along the way provided larger businesses with a comparative advantage, and retail credit management was intimately connected to the rise of department stores. By the 1930s, stores were studying good customers’ habits and sending them letters directing them to departments they might’ve overlooked—a way, Lauer argues, of restoring personalization to what had become impersonal relationships, but without needing a helpful clerk on the seller’s end. Which sounds a lot like today’s automated targeting, too.
Creditors’ and potential creditors’ intrusions into privacy were justified because of the moral claim of the creditor against a debtor. And the absence of consumer resistance to these privacy intrusions then, as now, “baffled credit bureau officials and credit managers,” especially given business resistance to disclosing similar information in the nineteenth century for business-to-business credit purposes. While many consumers resisted disclosing negative information in personal interviews, they’d tell a lot more to an impersonal form.
Credit bureaus also evaluated creditworthiness and classified people by relative risks, almost from their inception—creditworthiness isn’t as much about ability to pay as it is about readiness to pay. “Since wealth ensured nothing and character was a variable impossible to isolate or measure systematically, credit professionals turned to other metrics to predict trustworthiness.” Occupation was a primary one—teachers good, policemen and firemen not so much because “they feel that the public is under obligation to them and hence they take all the time they want to pay their debts.” Race (and nationality, determined by checking the applicant’s first name) was another standard means of classification.
Formalization came as part of the 19th century vogue for statistics and accounting; it was supposed to make differently worded, qualitative reports of reputation more reliable and comparable. Ratings came from no one in particular and appeared objective. Similarly, installment contracts with standardized wording displaced informal credit relationships between local retailers and trusted customers. Later, information culled from sources like newspaper clippings was dropped from credit reports as statistical credit scoring emerged, relying on preselected categories and not trying to get “a full picture” of the individual consumer. Social and economic stability—having a telephone in the house, having a savings account—could be measured directly where character could not. Quantifying credit risk also allowed lenders to begin experimenting with variable interest rates, so even late-paying customers could be made profitable. Early statistical systems, unsurprisingly, were distrusted by experienced “credit men” (and sometimes women), but there just weren’t enough of those trained professionals to cope with the exploding demand for credit. Credit scoring promised to reduce subjectivity and bias, even as it encoded the larger effects of bias into credit scores: “statistical credit scoring could not end discrimination by excluding superficial personal characteristics because gender and racial inequalities were woven directly into the fabric of American society.”
Local data often outstripped the information available to the (much smaller) state, and the FBI and IRS, among others, turned to credit bureaus for help. Lauer also discusses the self that credit reporting tried to construct: one engaged in monitoring itself-as-consumer, especially its capacity for repayment of debt. And creditworthiness is a moral judgment too; consumers’ beliefs in its morality helps get them to pay. Or at least, the professionals Lauer studied believed that—he points out that his focus on their justifications and practices doesn’t say much about what credit evaluation was like for consumers.
As it turned out, the free market alone didn’t drive the adoption of statistical credit scoring. Lauer points to government antidiscrimination mandates in the 1970s—which, perhaps ironically, drove the practice of using “impersonal” statistical pools to avoid charges of deliberate discrimination—as well as to Fannie and Freddie, which wanted to be able to compare scores of mortgagors in guaranteeing home loans in the 1990s. These government mandates forced previously diffuse sources of credit scoring to come together. But now we have new risk models for everything—whether someone will pay their gas bill may not be the same as whether they’ll pay their phone bill. Coming on the heels of the Equifax breach, Lauer offers a timely reminder that the system has now shifted to consumers the responsibility not only of monitoring their own credit-related behavior but also the responsibility of monitoring their own credit reports.
Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics: New York in the seventies came close to economic collapse. The popular diagnosis was that it spent too much on city services: free college, hospitals, child care, good union jobs for city workers in all those places as well as police and firefighters, welfare for the unemployed. However, Phillips-Fein argues that New York suffered not just because it was generous but because the rest of the country was stingy, engaging in policies that encouraged white flight and diminished the tax base. When the crisis peaked because banks would no longer lend and Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead, business leaders were able to take control under the claim “there is no alternative.” Thus austerity politics came to New York, and to the country.