But while all the little entrepreneurs were assiduously busy striving to morph into Galateas exquisitely engineered to succeed without really trying, special panopticons had to be erected to maintain actuarial notions of class membership and fixed identity. Credit proliferation required concerted management; liabilities had to be recurrently affixed to a vigorous continuous human identity; and an augmented scale of loan activity required further standardization of the entities that would be granted this credit. In the crisis literature, most attention has been focused on the transition from an “originate and hold” model of granting of loans to consumers (where the lender keeps possession of the loan) to a model of “originate and distribute,” facilitated by the process of securitization. This watershed was preceded by another just as critical: the extraction of judgments of creditworthiness out of a web of local personal relationships and the consequent injection of automation of judgment in the format of uniform quantitative indices provided by for-profit firms. For corporations, these services had been provided by the “Big Three” ratings agencies; for consumers, these were constructed as the FICO® scores from an algorithm invented by Fair Isaac and Company.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 359