FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores

Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.

At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.

> Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money.

I disagree.

You use credit to buy a car or buy a house when you don't have the cash to buy them up-front.

It's not so you can use them to make money, it's so you can use them to enjoy life.

> At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

Only if you go too far. The point is to buy things knowing what they'll cost monthly and for how long, and to budget those as part of your monthly expenses. As long as you can always handle those, you will never run out of hours available and it's not a house of cards. Nothing collapses. You pay off your car; you pay off your mortgage.

You seem to be treating this as something black-and-white when it's not. It's an incredibly useful tool when used with budgeting. Not "to make more money" but to have a better life for you and your family for when it matters the most. Nobody wants to wait until the kids have graduated from college to be able to buy their first house.

And even with credit cards -- yes you generally want to be paying them off in full monthly. But if you want to take a vacation a couple months before you could otherwise fully pay for it, it's really nice to have that convenience too. Not to mention covering some expenses for a few months if you lose your job. They're a tool to be used responsibly.

> They're a tool to be used responsibly.

I used to hate to take the position that government should save people from themselves, but I've moderated a lot on it. Some people clearly cannot use credit responsibly.

Societies used to understand this and put lots of limits around exploiting people, such as banning interest rates. But there is no unalloyed good. That ban also blocked rapid economic development as seen in the 19th century, where credit was absolutely critical for railroad construction and other infrastructure like electric or plumbing.

It's a real dilemma with tradeoffs, where slogans and soundbites don't work. Having opportunity means you may squander it. Too many guardrails on life paths and behavior blocks meritocratic social mobility as well as opportunities and motivation.

Since conditions are changing too fast there is no appropriate crystallized wisdom about it. There is no wealth of myths that would define how to live. The best we are able to say is the non-instruction to "be free" and to tap into your authentic self and author your life path with freedom and agency.

In biology one can distinguish evolved traits and behaviors (instincts) from learned ones. The latter can adapt much faster to the situation. Even better than learning from environmental feedback over one's lifetime is planning and simulating possible futures and deciding based on that. Somewhere between the individual lifetime and the genetic evolution levels, there is also the level of culture that used to reshape much slower than a single lifetime, taking lessons and condensing them over generations into templates. But more amd more as we diverge from the ancestral environmental conditions of the savannah and hunting-gathering in tight knit tribes and clans, we can less and less rely on biological instinct, cultural bedrock, wisdom from the parents' generation, what you learned a decade ago, and so on. We are forced to adapt and outmaneuver the shifting landscape faster than ever. More and more things pulling in entirely opposite directions. A vortex of stimuli to cut through with a machete-like mental strength. But most people are not built for this, and even those who are, constantly have to gamble and guess and rely on luck and hindsight.