As a young man, I lived in the Caribbean for a few years. People would clear cut fruit trees and bushes and replace them with lawns. We got here because we are stupid as fuck.
Simple: the earth produces a fuck tonne less food for like half the year, requiring some kind of strategy to handle the fact you have lots of food half the time and like no food the other half.
We took the "stash it in a special spot" approach.
But how do we stop other us's from stealing our stashes?
Strength in numbers, ape strong together. We form villages.
As we grow, we need leadership, mechanisms to keep track of each other, protect each other, and rules with how to fairly treat bad actors.
Laws, democracy, judicial systems come into play.
Oh shit, other village has cool shit. They want our cool shit. Trade? Trade! Commerce comes into play.
How do we keep track of people that are reliable to trade with and can be trusted across Trade networks?
Credit. Village A vouches on behalf of Trader, they have Credability, you can trust them.
Many villages create a unified system to describe this trust in a metric...
Thus: credit score.
In other words you have a credit score because of the way the earth makes food (that is to say, about half the time)
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how come towns and villages existed for tens of thousands of years with no credit scores?
They did. Even before money was a thing, there was an unofficial tally kept by members of a community as to who contributed and who didn't. Non-contributing members would lose social status and potentially access to the community's resources.
You don’t need one when there’s only like a hundred to a thousand people in a village. But when you have literally billions of people across the globe, you’re gonna need a more sophisticated way to measure people’s credibility.
Why would a system for tracking someone's historical reliability in lending, and then paying back, money be an anomaly? I mean I get the general sense of distaste in being boiled down to a number by financial institutions, but what I don't get is why anyone seems confused about how or why credit scores exists (other than that it makes for a nice hot take on Twitter)
In what world would something like a credit score NOT exist, given that a) you have a customer base larger than a couple hundred individuals, and b) you have a technology that allows you to calculate a risk/reward index on those individuals?
Countless hours have been poured into algorithms to rate things like movies on an easy to digest point system, when the stakes are as low as 2 hours of your time and 15 bucks. OF COURSE there is going to exist a system for communicating the risk of extending a lease or car loan or mortgage to individuals.
how come towns and villages existed for tens of thousands of years with no credit scores?
They did have them, just under a different name/implementation.
But the concept of collective trust is pretty core to any herd animal.
Modern credit scores mostly just differ in the fact you can obtain that info lightning fast, instead of by having to write a letter and waiting several weeks for the response on "can we trust this person's claims? Can you vouch for them?"
fishermen / traders would have accounts at local shops allowing their families to have things while they were away at sea for months or even years at a time, and pay them back when they returned.
I'd place a lot less of the cause of credit scores on the Earth's seasons than you, but this does make me wonder what the economic systems would look like on a habitable planet with no seasons, with year round stable temperatures/humidity/etc.
Most of society as a whole is due to it.
Herd behavior as a whole primarily comes about due to food scarcity strategies to improve security.
When groups of animals fight over food, they naturally form into larger groups to improve odds of success and then share the spoils.
In low scarcity scenarios typically you see herd behavior rarer and rarer, there's little need to form a pack if you have all your needs already met, why bother?
Actually credit scores came about in the 1700-1800s but were turned into their modern design in the 1980s.
So just a little bit later than when you're describing.
Credit scores weren't called "credit scores" of course.
It would be along the limes of having the church or kingdom or etc's blessing, or paperwork to indicate you are with a given trade guild or etc.
It came in many different flavors, as many different countries... exist....
Point being that there *were * long before mechanisms for many different villages and cities having an agreed upon mechanism for discerning "can we trust this person?"
The principle of Identification was a very early on problem that needed solving.
If some rando rrolls into your village claiming to be a trader selling official wares of (some other village), how would you know they were who they said they were?
Typically signed documents with an official seal was a good first start.
And that network of everyone agreeing so-and-so networks seals were associated with good traders that sold good wares is your first concept of a "credit score".
In reality existing banks today assigning people credit scores is just an abstracted system around the fundamentally simple concept of a trade guild.
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Everyone trusts the banks mechanisms for scoring.
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The banks are involved in all major transactions and seal their official approval on them
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And thus everyone participates in the trade guild by performing transactions with their legal tender.
This is sort of a fairly mandatory mechanism, and it's not even a terribly complex one tbh.
The only thing modern about it is the fact we store people's scores digitally and can share that info all across the world instantly. Which is very handy.
But it literally is just a number that evaluates "how much can you trust this person with lending them stuff" based on past times they've been trusted with important shot that got lent to them.
Unga lent Bunga his stick.
Bunga broke Ungas stick.
Unga tells whole village what happened.
Now no one will lend Bunga a new stick.
Credit score.
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You play Civ don't you
Man: "God, please help me get a job."
God: "What the fuck is a job?"
Man: "Work you do to make money."
God: "What the fuck is money?!"
Man: "Paper and metal we use to buy food."
God: "Buy food? I left food all over the fucking floor! Eat that!"
I know all of this is sort of a caricature but i hope most people here realize the many famines we have in history aren't because of sociopolitical issues. I know it's a joke. Sorry for being that guy 😔
many famines we have in history aren’t because of sociopolitical issues
That's increasingly untrue, particularly in the last century. To say we've got some kind of food shortage, you have to ignore everything from the Irish Potato Famine (in which English storehouses were so full of wheat that it rotted on the docks) to the Bengalese Famine (in which Churchill diverted foodstock away from East Indian ports as retribution for the wave of independence movements breaking out in the wake of WW2) to the US policy of buffalo hunting to near-extinction as a form of Indian removal to the engineered famines in Iraq and Palestine and North Korea and Cuba under international sanctions regimes.
What's more, where we've successfully ended the 19th century streak of famines, what we've seen is explicit socio-economic policy to improve foodstock production and distribution. This isn't an ecological problem (yet). It is entirely a logistics issue. We yield far more foodstock than we consume. And we've known we were producing more than we consume straight back to the early 20th century. Famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin even wrote a book on the subject, complete with a health amount of data analysis to support his theories, supporting the claim that then-modern wheat production should have already eliminated famine pretty much globally.
Live in the forest. Do magic. Befriend the fae. Become local folklore. Embrace your inner faerie-witch of the wood.
Be gay, do drugs, hail Satan.
🤘
Land Ownership.
Really, it all boils down to the land were people could grow their own food and build their own place to live, having been taken from the Commons and made property of just some people.
We aren't born free unless we're born from very wealthy parents, so we're forced to do work for others merelly to have food on our plates and a roof over our heads: we can't just grab a piece of land and do the work ourselves in there to raise said food and build said roof and must instead first, and at minimum, work for others within a system not of our design to get our hands on the required value tokens needed to acquire said land.
Credit Scores is just a modern artifact of the increasingly complex architecture that structurally forces most of us to be servants of others without the use of direct cohertion (so that we can be swindled into believing we have free choice), which was built up from that foundation in ages past when the land was taken away from most of our ancestors and which is kept going by all manner of laws, not only those codifying and enforcing land ownership but even those which make asset ownership yield far more income than work (thus making land owners and other owners have a vast advantage in acquiring value tokens over the servants who have to work for them).
ABUNDANCE IS SCARCITY
RENTING IS OWNING
ADVERTISING IS ENTERTAINMENT
literally 2024.
Well only been 40 years since that book came out about time the 1% make a manual.
I get what ur saying but no, the planet did not grow food. Before humans started breeding plants, the fruit from plants were barely of any nutritonal value. The berries shown here would have been a fraction of their size, much fewer per plant and would have tasted like shit.
Humanity could probably manage to live the pure vegan lifestyle today but we would still need machines, electricity, huge farms, etc to get enough supply.
I think wild berries like woodland strawberries and wild mushrooms are quite the same as before agriculture, but we were much less and moving much more to gather food.
Yeah its actually really fun, trying old variants of things we are used to as well. Like much older breeds of bananas for example.
The usual supermarket vegetables and fruit are bred for cost effectiveness so much, that they barely resemble their predecessors in size or taste and sometimes the old ones are actually way better.
Kinda reminds me when I was having an argument with my Conservative dad about how the basics we need to survive (i.e. food) should be provided free. And actually got him to see "you're acting like it fucking grows on tress" and I just stared him down until he realised what he said and stammered out a "yeah but pigs and stuff dont" but he was clearly just a a bit embarrassed with himself.
Be ungovernable
Have a bad credit score
Well all that really means is you are locked out of building meaningful wealth forever. You can still gets loads and loads of revolving debt with incredibly high rates and payday loans that are somehow worse rates than literal mafia loan sharks.
Well all that really means is you are locked out of building meaningful wealth forever
Then clearly my only path forward is to hold the world ransom for one million dollars.
Ungovernable and homeless! Even people on Craigslist looking for roommates check credit scores now, and some jobs.
That being said my credit score is in the 500s; and medical debt and student loan debt doesn't cause me anxiety like it used to because what more can they do? Garnish my wages? My wages are already too low to pay my rent so if they start stealing my paycheck I'll become homeless and they still won't get their money. I'll be more likely to die, but then they really won't get their money.
We are the product of processes that value quantity of lives over quality of life. Agriculture did not make human lives better, but it allowed more humans to live on the same amount of land - so it won over hunting-gathering.
Okay Chris McCandless, go live in the wild then. No one is stopping you.
Sadly that’s more and more illegal as time passes.
Okay Chris McCandless, go live in the wild then. No one is stopping you.
Gonna have to have a talk with a park ranger about how wrong that is.
Opting out of society is a thing that most of us can do, it's just that none of us want to because, believe it or not, the benefits tend to outweigh the costs!
