Fascinating especially in discussing how use of data science allows psychological distancing from the actual task: predatory loaning
Capital One collects $23 billion in interest per year—an average that works out to $181 from each family in America. Of course, not every family has a Capital One account, and most public surveys say roughly half of people with credit cards pay them in full and accrue no interest. So simple math tells you that many families are paying Capital One at least $800 in interest every year.
People at Capital One are extremely friendly. But one striking fact of life there was how rarely anyone acknowledged the suffering of its customers. It’s no rhetorical exaggeration to say that the 3,000 white-collar workers at its headquarters are making good money off the backs of the poor. The conspiracy of silence that engulfed this bottom-line truth spoke volumes about how all of us at Capital One viewed our place in the world, and what we saw when we looked down from our glass tower. This is not meant to offer a broad-brush indictment of business at Capital One; it is hardly the only corporation that has been ethically compromised by capitalism. It is, however, meant to shine a few photons of light on the financial industry in a post-crisis age of acute inequality.
Amid the daily office banter at Capital One, we hardly ever broached the essence of what we were doing. Instead, we discussed the “physics” of our work. Analysts would commonly say that “whiteboarding”—a gratifying exercise in gaming out equations on the whiteboard to figure out a better way to build a risk model or design an experiment—was the favorite part of their job. Hour-long conversations would oscillate between abstruse metaphors representing indebtedness and poverty, and an equally opaque jargon composed of math and finance-speak.
If you were not familiar with the almanac of metaphors—many of which, as I understand it, were specific to Capital One—you would not follow the conversations. The “bathtub,” for example, denotes a loan portfolio, because it’s like water down the drain when you lose customers—either because they have closed their account or were fed up with Capital One or have involuntarily defaulted on their loan. When you spend tens of millions of dollars on marketing, that’s turning on the spigot for new water in your “bathtub.”
It was common to hear analysts say things like, “I just love to solve problems.” But what they were really doing was solving something closer to puzzles. It’s clear to me, for example, that the janitor at my middle school solved problems when she cleaned up trash. It’s far less clear whether analysts at Capital One are solving problems or creating them. In either event, the work culture at this well-appointed lender of dwindling resort is pretty much designed to encourage former students of engineering or math to let their minds drift for a few years and forget whether the equations in front of them represent the laws of thermodynamics or single moms who want to pay for their kids’ Christmas gifts without having to default on their rent or utilities payments.
Before I managed Capital One’s secured card product, I worked on what we called “Mainstreet proactive credit limit increases” or “Mainstreet pCLIP” for short. Mainstreet was yet another piece of euphemistic in-house jargon; it meant subprime. As for proactive credit limit increase, it meant raising the cap on how much someone is allowed to borrow—without getting their permission to raise the cap.
The emails we used to send these “Mainstreet pCLIP” customers would go as follows: “Elena Botella, you’re a valued customer, and we want you to get more out of your card. So recently, your credit line was increased to $6550.00. This gives you more in your wallet, which gives you more flexibility. Thank you for choosing Capital One®. Enjoy your higher credit line.”
At any bank, if you have a low credit score, you’re only likely to get a credit limit increase if you’re getting close to your existing credit limit. So if you got that email, you probably had a few thousand dollars of Capital One credit card debt at an interest rate of at least 20 percent. That implies you were probably paying Capital One around $40 in interest per month or more. You might want or need to borrow more money on top of what you’ve already borrowed, but I always thought it was a little bit sick for us to be telling people to “enjoy” their higher credit line. It felt more than a little like shouting, “Enjoy getting into more debt, suckers!” before disappearing in a cloud of smoke and speeding off in a Tesla.
Capital One’s culture of experimentation also acted as a kind of buffer. Fast Company has reported that Capital One runs 80,000 experiments per year. As Christopher Worley and Edward Lawler III explain in the journal Organizational Dynamics, a bank like Capital One can randomly assign differing interest rates, payment options, or rewards to various customers and see which combinations are most profitable for any given segment of people. It’s not so different from how a pharmaceutical company might use a randomized control trial to test whether a new drug is effective, except that the results of the bank’s experiment will never get published, and instead of curing diseases, the bank is trying to extract more money from each customer. The use of experiments is itself an act of psychological distancing; it allows the analysts controlling the experiment to resolutely apply its findings as a profit-maximizing mandate without giving the strategy a name such as, oh, “predatory lending.”
The rise of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence means that you don’t need venal corporate tycoons wearing Monopoly Man hats to grind the faces of the poor into the dirt. Under the data-driven directives of Capitalism 2.0, you can have a bunch of friendly data scientists who don’t think too deeply about the models they’re building, while tutoring low-income kids on the side. As far as they’re concerned, they’re refining a bunch of computer algorithms.
