Here’s the thing: I’ve seen a few of the metrics they use to calculate credit scores, and they’re all meaningless ad-hoc rules that were obviously fabricated ou

Here’s the thing: I’ve seen a few of the metrics they use to calculate credit scores, and they’re all meaningless ad-hoc rules that were obviously fabricated out of whole cloth. It makes sense when you think about it: if you woke up in the morning and your credit score had dropped 50 points, and they told you it was because they changed the rules, you would say that it was unfair. And so the calculation method hasn’t changed since the 50’s. My guess is, some guy with a crew cut and horn rim glasses lit up a cigarette, threw back a shot of whiskey, got out his number 2 pencil and just wrote a bunch of stuff down on a piece of paper, and that’s still how credit scores are done. But even if it was originally a useful metric, and even if it somehow remained valid after all this time, it still would be useless, because once you make a metric into a target, it stops being a useful metric. So the question is: why do people still use credit scores? The answer is simple: it’s a game we play. It’s like the kobyashi maru of finance: the only way to win is to cheat. There are all kinds of ways to hack your credit score, by opening up a line of credit you don’t need and paying it off really fast, whatever. And what they are looking for is the people who will play along, who will do whatever it takes to get a high score, even knowing the score is meaningless, because the kind of person who is willing to do that is also the kind of person who is likely to have a lot of money. And that’s why we use credit scores.