Finally! It's just too bad my insurance score is still too low for me to get the required homeowner's insurance because the car company shared my driving data with insurance data brokers, and they don't like that I park in front of bars every Friday night, they don't know it's because I have a third job as a busboy. It's ok though, cause at least I'm still free to tip my landlord, and employment rates are up!
The sadder thing is that Chinese social credit hasn’t actually even been implemented, and doesn’t seem like it’s going to. There are only limited local experiments, most of which are allegedly largely irrelevant.
Whereas there are multiple credit score companies currently tracking literally everyone who has a bank account.
I got rejected just last week for something pretty inexpensive that I can afford to pay off in installments. My credit score is good and I've never defaulted on any payments before. I live in the UK, not in China.
AFAIK the social credit system that westerners like to mock was only trialled and never implemented. I, on the other hand, have actually been screwed over by my own country's credit score system.
There's a key difference: One is based on just your financial history, only on the numbers. The other is based on everything you do all the time, which is way way way more privacy invasive.
We tried personally evaluating people for loans on their individual merits, and shocker, there was rampant racism and sexism. Having strict metrics, instead of relying on the whims of a dickwad loan agent, is a good thing.
The new system isn't perfect, and yeah, it completely favors people who have parents who know how the system works. But at least it's not explicitly racist or sexist (again, there are of course systemic issues that feed into it).
I get that it's frustrating to, for example, need to have debt in order to qualify for more debt. But in other contexts this is pretty standard --- it's essentially "financial experience."
But yeah. It sucks that you should pay expenses with a credit card rather than debit in the USA. Personally it doesn't matter to me (I pay them off every month), but it sucks for merchants who get stuck with the credit card transaction fees.