Martha Poon has flagged this watershed as a shift from "credit-control-by-screening" to "credit-control-by-risk-category"; we just designate it "neoliberalism," the latest installment in the surveillance of the modular entrepreneurial self. Indeed, by the late 1990s, FICO scores had become all-purpose quantitative proxies for your "worth" as a human being, rendering your debts comparable with those of a million others, incorporated directly into the models that served to justify stratification into the various trenches of the mortgage-backed securities that were one direct cause of the crisis.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 360