Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America by Josh Lauer (review)

Many of the most engaging pieces of scholarship are dedicated to making the familiar strange. Communications scholar Josh Lauer's recent book, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America, embodies this tradition. In Lauer's readable, engaging monograph, he reminds readers that creditworthiness is a weird moral concept that masquerades as a financial fact; that a three-digit number pretending to encapsulate one's creditworthiness is also weird; and that the vast, unaccountable credit-rating institutions that constantly surveil America's consumers are, in fact, weirder yet. Along the way, Lauer unpacks the meaning of credit rating. He situates credit rating within a 200-year history of private-sector surveillance. And he both challenges and complements existing histories of capitalism and modernity. All told, Lauer's work is quite impressive; both historians of capitalism and theorists of modernity would be wise to consult it.

Creditworthy offers readers several compelling arguments. First, the book argues that, contrary to popular belief, credit rating is not a product of the late twentieth century. While the standardized FICO credit score—the omnipresent three-digit rating of individuals' creditworthiness—is a product of the 1980s, credit rating is in fact a far older enterprise. Indeed, the earliest ancestors of modern creditrating agencies, Lauer argues, were the commercial credit-reporting firms that emerged in the decades before the Civil War. These enterprises devoted their attention to commercial borrowers rather than everyday consumers. But they nevertheless collected vast troves of information on their subjects, much of it scurrilous, and later abstracted that information into easy-to-digest ratings. In doing so, they pioneered a formula that latter-day consumer credit-rating agencies would follow: they united private-sector surveillance with an abstract system of classifying borrowers and packaged that system as an antidote to the anonymity of the modern American marketplace.

But while consumer credit-rating agencies used the same basic formula as their commercial counterparts, they did not emerge until decades later. They were slow to emerge because both the supply of and demand for consumer credit were limited before the late nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, Americans' appetite for mass-produced goods was on the rise—as was industrialists' desire to avoid the pitfalls of overproduction. As a result, retailers and bankers unleashed a wave of consumer lending. And a new class of credit-rating professionals emerged to help lenders distinguish "good" credit risks from "bad."

The industry these professionals pioneered changed dramatically over the following century. While the first generation of consumer credit-rating professionals was typically associated with retailers, credit-rating bureaus were, by the 1930s, primarily organized around cities or regions. A new national association, moreover, helped regularize the mishmash of data-collection and management protocols used by the earlier agencies. The next big change occurred in the 1960s, when these regional agencies began to computerize their records. And, in the 1980s, the hundreds of regional offices were consolidated into the ancestors of today's big three—Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. Since then, the industry has become increasingly reliant upon predictive algorithmic rating systems like the FICO score.

For historians, particularly historians of capitalism, Lauer's arguments about the origins and history of credit reporting will likely prove Creditworthy's most useful feature. Lauer's historical narrative fills important gaps in our current understanding of American capitalism. While work on advertising has helped scholars understand how capitalists convinced consumers to buy their goods, scholars have, until Lauer's work, known significantly less about how capitalists and lenders compelled consumers to pay for these items.

However, for scholars of modernity—that amorphous but nevertheless useful term—Lauer's arguments about the scale and scope of privatesector surveillance will likely prove more useful than his comments on history. Indeed, while theorists of modernity have typically focused on the state as the pioneer of practices of...