The Score

Time was, they decided it with a handshake and a hard look across a desk.

A working man would come into the bank, hat in his hands, needing to borrow against a sick season or a busted truck, and the banker would size him up—his collar, his church, his color, the calluses or the lack of them—and render a verdict on what they liked to call the man's character. It was a crooked business, riddled with every prejudice the banker carried in, and we were right to hate it. So in time they took the banker's prejudiced eye away and gave us something that was sold to us as fairer, cleaner, scientific—a number. Three digits, somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred and fifty, computed by a private company off in California, that would henceforth decide what your money would cost you and whether you could have any at all.

And here is the genius of the thing, the part that would have made the old company-store men weep with envy: the number feels like justice. It looks like math. It does not appear to hate you the way the banker did. And so the man it grinds down has been taught to believe that the grinding is fair—that a low score is a low character, a verdict on his discipline and his worth, rather than what it very largely is: a faithful readout of how little money he had to begin with. They built a machine for charging the poor the most, and the masterstroke was making the poor believe they had earned it.

Let us be clear-eyed about what the number actually measures, because it is not virtue. Look at what lifts a score and what sinks it. It rises when you have a long history of credit—which means you were prosperous enough to be lent to, early and often. It rises when you use only a sliver of the credit available to you—which is effortless if your limits are high and your needs are low, and nearly impossible if your limit is five hundred dollars and the furnace just died. It rises with a mortgage faithfully paid—which means you could afford a house. And it falls for a medical emergency you did not choose, for a thin file because you were too poor to be offered credit in the first place, for using most of a small limit because the limit is small. Strip the science off it and the credit score is, in great part, a measure of how much money you already have, laundered into a measure of how good a person you are.

Then they take that laundered number and they price you by it—and the pricing runs exactly backwards from any notion of mercy. The less you have, the more they charge you to borrow. Look at the plain figures on something as ordinary as a car, which in this country is not a luxury but the thing that gets you to the job.

The official story is that this is simply prudent. The poor, they say, are riskier—more likely to fall behind—so they must be charged more to cover the danger. But turn that over in your hand and look at the bottom of it. Charging a struggling family a higher rate is the single most reliable way on God's earth to push them under. The high rate does not measure the risk of drowning. It ties weights to the ankles of the people already standing in the deep end, and then points to the drownings as proof the weights were warranted. The score does not predict who will fail so much as it arranges for them to.

And the same arrangement, run on a family with no card at all, becomes something far uglier. The person the score has shut out does not stop needing money when the rent is due and the cupboard is bare. He goes where the door is still open—to the payday lender on the corner, the one that doubles as a pawn shop—and there the price of a hundred dollars until Friday is not a rate any decent country would permit. Set the cost of money side by side, top of the ladder to bottom, and you will see the whole moral arithmetic of the thing in one picture.

Now lift your eyes to the top of that chart, to the little teal sliver, and let me tell you the thing they would rather you never set beside the rest of it. The wealthy do not live by the score at all. They never see the inside of the trap, because they walk through an entirely different door—and on the other side of that door, borrowing is not a punishment but the central trick of staying rich.

It goes by a plain little name in the private banks: buy, borrow, die. A rich man's fortune sits in stock and property that has swollen in value over the years. If he sold any of it to get cash, he would owe tax on the gain—so he does not sell. He borrows against it instead, at the gentle rates you give a man who has plenty, pledging his shares as collateral and pulling out millions to live on, to buy the jet, to buy more assets still. And here is the part that ought to stop your heart: that borrowed money is not taxed, because a loan is not income. He spends it freely and pays the government nothing, while his fortune keeps right on growing behind the loan. Then he dies, and the law performs its final kindness: the gain that was never taxed in his lifetime is simply wiped clean for his heirs. The whole untaxed pile passes down, and the cycle begins again in the next generation.

This is not a rumor or a loophole nobody uses. When the reporters at ProPublica got hold of the actual tax records, they found that the twenty-five richest Americans paid a true tax rate of about three and a half percent on the growth of their wealth—while a working household pays something near fourteen percent of its income, taken out of every check before the worker ever touches it.

So set the two borrowers side by side and look at them honestly, because the comparison is the whole report in a single frame.

And the score does not stop at the loan desk. That is what makes it a collar and not merely a price tag. The same three digits follow a person into every room of a poor life. The landlord pulls the number before he hands over the keys, so the family with the low score is turned away from the cheaper apartment and herded toward the dearer one. The car-insurance company runs a version of it and charges the low-scored driver more for the very same coverage—not because he drives worse, but because he is poor, which they have decided is the same thing. The utility company wants a deposit from him that it waives for the man with the high number. Some employers have peeked at it before offering a job—so that a low score, born of being broke, can keep a man from the work that would make him un-broke. It is a single number, and it taxes every corner of a life at the bottom.

Now we come to the heart of it—the thing this whole report has been walking toward. It is not merely that the score charges the poor the most. It is that the system which built this two-tiered ladder then turns to the man on the bottom rung and tells him, with a straight face, that he is down there because of his own bad character. You should have managed your credit better. You should have shown more discipline. You should have been more like the responsible people at the top.

It is the oldest cruelty dressed in a new suit. We have taken an arrangement—a deliberate, designed arrangement in which the people with the least are charged the most, shut out of the cheap money, and herded toward the dear—and we have moralized it. We have made a structural fact wear the mask of a personal failing. The wealthy man avoiding his taxes by borrowing against his pile is called sophisticated. The poor woman borrowing against her paycheck to keep the lights on is called subprime, which is a banker's word that has quietly come to mean a lesser kind of person. We built the indenture, and then we handed the indentured a report card and told him the chains were his grades.

I will be fair, the way I have tried to be in all of these. A lender is owed some honest way to tell who can repay; a record of borrowing is not, in itself, a wicked thing. The thief is not the existence of the number. The thief is what the number has been built and tuned to do—to dress proximity to money as proof of virtue, to charge the squeezed the most, to reach into the rent and the insurance and the job and the lights, and above all to teach its victims that the squeezing is their own fault. Remember, too, where this machine comes from. Its grandfather was redlining—the maps the banks once drew with literal red lines around the poor and the Black neighborhoods, to mark who would be denied. We outlawed the maps. The score is redlining that learned to do its work without a map, and to call itself colorblind while it does it.

Now hear the good news, because every rail this country ever built against the moneylender, it built with its own hands, and it can build them again. We have had usury laws—hard caps on what any lender may charge—for most of human history, and where we still have them the loan shark goes hungry. We already decided, as a nation, that an interest rate near four hundred percent is so predatory it cannot be inflicted on our soldiers: the Military Lending Act caps their rate at thirty-six percent. There is no earthly reason the cashier and the nurse deserve less protection than the private. The credit unions make small emergency loans at twenty-eight percent and below and do not go broke doing it. We can cap the rates for everyone. We can bar the score from the rent and the job and the insurance, where it has no honest business. We can take the medical debt off the reports, so that getting sick is not a financial sentence. We can build public and postal banking, so the poor are not left as prey for the corner shark. And we can close the rich man's door—tax the borrowed millions, end the wiping-clean at death—so that borrowing is no longer a tax dodge at the top and a trap at the bottom.

And the deepest cure is the one this paper comes back to every time: pay the wage. A people paid enough to live does not have to borrow to eat, and a people that does not have to borrow to eat cannot be ranked, priced, and disciplined by a number that measures how desperate they are. The score has power over you only in the gap the missing wage opened. Close that gap, and the three digits lose their teeth.

You Are Not Your Number

So when they show you the three digits and tell you they are the measure of your worth—when the rate comes back high and the voice on the phone implies, ever so politely, that a better sort of person would have a better sort of score—do not believe the part where it becomes your fault. The number is not your character. It is, in the main, a readout of what you started with, run through a machine built by people who profit when you score low. The rich man borrowing against his mountain is doing the very thing you are condemned for, and being knighted for it. The difference between you is not virtue. It is the mountain.

Refuse the verdict. Refuse it for yourself, and refuse it out loud for the man beside you whose number is lower than yours—because the moment we stop accepting that a low score is a low character, the whole moral machinery of the thing falls apart in their hands. Cap the rates. Free the rent and the job and the lights from the number. Pay the wage that ends the borrowing. And say it plainly, together, until they have no choice but to hear it: a human being is not a credit risk to be priced and blamed. A human being is a someone. And don't you dare lose hope.

Notes On The Record