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Creditworthy

A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict our riskiness as borrowers and to judge our trustworthiness and value in a broad array of contexts, from insurance and marketing to employment and housing.
In Creditworthy, the first comprehensive history of this crucial American institution, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from its nineteenth-century origins to the rise of the modern consumer data industry. By revealing the sophistication of early credit reporting networks, Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person's trustworthiness. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reports—and, later, credit ratings and credit scores—credit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned with—and determines—our social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 15, 2017
      Mass surveillance of the American public has grown in technological sophistication and scope, but it isn’t a new phenomenon, and it’s being driven by capitalist enterprise rather than the government, argues Lauer, a professor of media studies, in this fascinating study of the credit-rating industry’s central role in creating the “modern surveillance society.” The story reaches back to the “market revolution” of the mid-19th century, when entrepreneur Lewis Tappan, spurred by the financial panic of 1837, successfully launched the first credit-reporting enterprise. Lauer follows this history forward through major developments, including the creation of easy consumer credit, the rise of credit scoring, and the onset of big data. Throughout, he carefully maps the necessity for evaluating creditworthiness in an impersonal modern market (and for carefully modulating “the treadmill of debt” in a debt-strapped U.S.) onto cultural shifts—not least the construction of “financial identity” as a facet of a person’s full identity, and even a way of gauging a person’s moral worth. This story of mass surveillance is unavoidably lopsided, Lauer acknowledges, since the perspectives of consumers (especially before the dawn of consumer advocacy) remain largely out of reach of the historian. Nevertheless, Lauer’s top-down economic history is a thorough, enlightening, and long-overdue contribution to the field.

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  • English

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