Month: September 2017

Equifax Isn’t A Data Problem. It’s A Political Problem.

The credit reporting debate we should be having. (Huffington Post)

Here’s a simple thought experiment to understand how the use of data has changed America. If The Great Gatsby were written today, it would be a one-page story about a rich guy who lied a lot and threw great parties until someone ran a credit check. That’s what the ability to instantly access and exchange personal data has done: It has reordered the very notion of identity. No one is a stranger anymore, at least not when it comes to credit relationships.
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Lords of Misrule

How the legal profession became Wall Street’s helpmeet. (The Baffler)

In 1937, future Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson gave a toast at the New York State Bar Association on the civic responsibilities of the legal profession. “No other people have submitted so generally to lawyer leadership,” he said. Yet, he argued, “There is no constitutional protection for our lawyer monopoly.” Jackson was referring, in a tone of populist outrage, to the new wave of big law firms that were then vehemently opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and its crackdown on Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 crash. “We must rely solely on the record of a trust well fulfilled to perpetuate lawyer control.” Jackson was the last Supreme Court Justice not to graduate from law school, and he hated the corruption of the craft of lawyering via the growth of corporate law, centered then in the American Bar Association. Jackson believed that the professionalization of the law and the resulting priority of financial over ethical considerations among lawyers have been toxic for American democracy.

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