Item — HN Reader

I really respect your attitude.

I haven't been in a desperate need for a loan, nor seen people feeling the guilt of failing to pay back, so it's hard for me to relate. It's helpful to learn about it.

> it’d be interesting to see how incentives rather than disincentives might work in a lending situation

What kind of incentives might work here? I thought about a public trust score (some kind of "karma") that is attributed to people if they pay back succussfully. Not sure how well it would work in practice.

1 comments

The whole karma thing is an odd one. I look at something like the social credit systems in China with some trepidation, as the power in the instrument is immense - but at the same time think the concept as a whole potentially has legs. Why not reward people for good behaviour? Be monetarily poor but of good reputation, xyz is open to you. Be rich and of poor reputation, then those same possibilities are closed.

I suppose the problem arises when you start trying to arbitrate good and bad, and who gets to be that arbiter. If you boil it away to purely a system for rewarding actions around financial credit, then you have... credit scores.