Your human worth, defined

You know how your medical records are supposed to be private? How your tax records are between you and the tax office?

Well, Corporate America, with its now much more invasive credit reporting agencies, has implemented its own system for monitoring every facet of your life and punishing you if you transgress against their secret rules – their own Meritocratic Utopia. A system where they determine your human worth on often irrelevant and always self-serving criteria and then, through their dominance of every facet of modern life, make sure you’re kept in your place.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has written a series of posts on this rather disturbing development, in which your credit score rises and falls not on whether you’re in debt or not, but on magical formulae which are proprietary and secret, and the consequences of which are that you’ll find it harder to find everything from housing to – cruelly – a job.

They are well worth a read, and quite chilling:

• Credit Scoring and Unemployment, in which we learn that 43% of HR managers now demand access to credit reports… which, itself, makes a job applicant’s credit score worse and makes it harder to find a job;
• Tips On Improving Your HW Score, in which we learn the absurd ways these things are calculated (“Human Worth Score” being his sarcastic term in the “Meritocratic Utopia” post above for what they’re turning a credit check into);
• Why every AG in the country should be suing the credit rating agencies.

It’s depressing and worrying that authorities in the US have let this shamefully discriminatory and oppressive system get that far. Keep your eyes open – there’s no reason they won’t try the same stuff here.