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

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.

The "average person" is told from birth to consume as many things and experiences as possible as it if was the only thing that could give their life a meaning. The entire system is based on growth and consumption, I have a hard time blaming "the average person"

Credit, in this sense, is also used to solve a cash flow problem. It’s a bad sign when that credit (or Klarna Pay-in-3 style setups) is applied to basic day to day expenses like buying groceries or other necessities.

Basically the market’s answer to increasing poverty: you’re not getting paid more, so how about we give you a payment plan to spread things out?

Why does it feel different? 1: the amount of stuff we buy has increased a lot. Anybody who owns what would be considered solidly middle class in the early 1970s will feel quite poor today. 2: financial security is way down.

In the early seventies a middle class family of 6 would own a 1200 square foot house, a single car, a single TV and a single radio would be the sum total of the entertainment electronics they owned, they'd have less than a dozen outfits apiece, they'd eat out about once a month, a vacation to a neighboring state would feel like a splurge, et cetera.

But they were relatively content. 1: they were much better off than their parents and grandparents, who experienced the depression & WW2. 2: they were "keeping up with the Joneses". 3: they had a feeling of financial security due to job security and the fact that serious health events were unlikely to financially devastating.

Maybe some of that problem is about spending too much money, but it cannot be denied that housing are unaffordable and that transportation is inefficient and is a mess.

Huh? Doesn't the average American live in a city? The whole reason for accepting being squeezed in tightly with other people is so that you don't have to worry about transportation; enabling everything you could ever want and need to be found in short walking distance.

Transportation is for people in rural areas. Yes, it is expensive, but that's exactly why most people left rural areas for the city long ago.

That's the thing, a lot of Americans really don't like this idea of being squeezed in tightly. People really don't like having a shared wall. And it's not that people like these tightly squeezed lot lines, they'd prefer 1 acre lots. These tiny lots are all they can afford while still being somewhat acceptable to them about commutes. Which Americans seem to really just not care about commute times when comparing to tradeoffs on house size and not having shared walls.

And in the end, you can only buy what the cities and towns allow to have built. Which is chosen by those who live there at the time. The cities then make single family structures a requirement, have minimum setbacks and lot sizes, have rigid separations between residential and commercial spaces, etc. So even those people who would want to own an apartment over a commercial suite in what you'd consider an urban area can't make that choice because that choice is illegal.

But people act like these zoning laws just come about on their own. The thing is, these zoning laws are popular. They get put into place because that's what the people who actually vote in local elections push for. I've seen proposal after proposal in cities around me to change zoning to allow density even in limited areas get fought tooth and nail by residents. I remember a project nearby where there was a proposal to build a mixture of 2-3 unit townhouses, some single-family narrow lots, and a tiny spot of commercial for like a coffee shop on land that was currently zoned industrial. All of this connected to the bike network, a large city park and a nature preserve nearby, and good transit connection at the end of the neighborhood. The neighborhoods around fought it tooth and nail and eventually the builder walked away after trying to negotiate for a few years. Well, the land was already zoned industrial, construction broke ground months later to build warehouses. Now instead of a nice neighborhood on my bike path there's warehouses with semi-trucks rolling through all day long. Good job, NIMBYs!