Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.32 (606 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 023116808X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 368 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-01-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. His historical studies of communication technology, surveillance, and financial culture have appeared in Technology and Culture, New Media & Society, and several edited collections. Josh Lauer is an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire
Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned withand determinesour social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reportsand, later, credit ratings and credit scorescredit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. 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. By revealing the sophistication of ear
Lauer has written a compelling history of how businesses assess creditworthiness, from nineteenth-century trade associations to contemporary data science mavens. John, Columbia University)At last! A book that drills down into the history of consumer credit-scoring and demonstrates its massive contribution to our daily experience of contemporary surveillance. Long before there were FICO scores, consumers' creditworthiness was being assessed and considered. Who deserves credit? Who is a prime borrower, and who is subprime? The stakes of these questions could not be higher: loans are essential to the education, transport, and housing of millions. Josh Lauer has dug deep into the historical sources and