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[...] 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 decisive. Future legislators need to take into account the ease with which big data mongers can do an end run around law designed for an analog age. For example, in the case of “time since last job,” they may allow it to be up to 15 percent of a “hiring score,” but no more. Just as accounting rules had to adjust to accommodate firms increasingly complex and fractional interests in other firms, laws governing credit and employment decisions need to become far more specific about the extent to which a forbidden ground of decision making can enter into scores meant to influence decisions.
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 coordination—a process that could take decades. Or they could simply move their trading overseas.
the perils of living in a world with national regulatory regimes but globalised capital
[...] 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.
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 credit rather than public grant is the key to opportunity. Would-be homeowners, students, and the very poor are forced back on commercial credit to buy places to live, to prepare for careers, or even just to pay the costs of day-to-day living. By and large, private lenders are simply looking to generate more private wealth, rather than to invest long term in individuals or communities. [...]
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 their largely automated ways of processing disputes or handling customer inquiries are, inevitably, the way things are and must always be. Until we do, we enforce upon ourselves an unnecessary helplessness, and a self-incurred tutelage.
The arbitrariness of many forms of reputation creation is becoming clearer all the time. I will not recapitulate here the problems of discrimination (racial, political, economic, and competitive) that we examined earlier. Unfairness in today’s Internet industries should be obvious by now, and is another important reason to be wary of reification. “The Internet” is a human invention, and can be altered by humans. [...]
Our technologies are just as much a product of social, market, and political forces as they are the outgrowth of scientific advance. They are intimately embedded in social practices that rely on human judgment. [...]
[...] Above all, what are these giant salaries and bonuses really for? What value does society derive from the work that they theoretically compensate?
referring specifically to finance but applies everywhere tbh
“Leaving it to the finance experts” is a recipe for decline, because the success of the finance industry bears no inevitable relationship to the long-term health of the economy. Finance can be extractive or uplifting, narrowly short-termist or focused on the infrastructural and investment needs of society as a whole. To address those needs consistently, we need a government interested in forward-thinking industrial policy, and willing to enforce its interest. [...]
[...] Rather than an affluent society, Baudrillard argues that we live in a 'growth society'. However, this growth brings us no closer to being an affluent society. Growth produces both wealth and poverty. In fact, growth is a function of poverty; growth is needed to contain the poor and maintain the system. While he is not always consistent on this, Baudrillard argues that the growth society is, in fact, the opposite of the affluent society. Its inherent tensions lead to psychological pauperization as well as systematic penury (see later) since `needs' will always outstrip the production of goods. Since both wealth and shortage are inherent in the system, efforts like those proposed by Galbraith to solve the problem of poverty are doomed to failure. [...]
[...] Rather than a reciprocal sharing of what people have, modern society is characterized by differentiation and competition which contributes to the reality and the sense that there is never enough. Since the problem lies in social relationships (or in the social logic), it will not be solved by increases in production, by innovations in productive forces, or by what we usually think of as even greater abundance. The only solution to the problem lies in a change in social relationships and in the social logic. We need a social logic that brings with it the affluence of symbolic exchange, rather than one that condemns us to `luxurious and spectacular penury'. [...]
If one tries to summarize all of the things that consumption is and is not, it seems clear that to Baudrillard consumption is not, contrary to conventional wisdom, something that individuals do and through which they find enjoyment, satisfaction and fulfilment. Rather, consumption is a structure (or Durkheimian social fact) that is external to and coercive over individuals. While it can and does take the forms of a structural organization, a collective phenomenon, a morality, it is above all else a coded system of signs. Individuals are coerced into using that system. The use of that system via consumption is an important way in which people communicate with one another. The ideology associated with the system leads people to believe, falsely in Baudrillard's view, that they are affluent, fulfilled, happy and liberated.