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It is not helpful to have politicians across the political spectrum meekly submitting to this technolibertarianism—assuming that bureaucrats, and by extension themselves, are inherently incapable of influencing technical innovation. We must curb the tendency to reify the tech giants—to assume that …

The importance of credit reputation grows as public assistance shrinks. Austerity promotes loans as a lifeline for an insecure precariat. Students who once earned state scholarships are now earning profits for government or private lenders. In our “market state” and “ownership society,” _private cr…

[...] Playing catch-up with the banks and the scorers and the Internet giants just reinforces their power over us. We should be challenging their rules, not trying to keep ahead of them.

However ambitiously American finance regulators may set standards, their efforts are compromised by the internationalization of major firms, which plead that any stringent national standard for recording information may make it harder to do business overseas. They want to wait for international c…

[...] Legislators are beginning to address that by proposing bills that would make long-term unemployment an illicit basis for hiring decisions. But number crunchers may simply feed “length of time since last job” into their hiring models, and if that factor is weighted heavily, it could be utterly…