Indeed how will this risk-based priced consumer generation respond?

Sir Aline van Duyn is exploring vital terrain in “Hard-pressed consumers refuse to read from script” August 18 analyzing how this generation of “risk-based priced” consumers will respond.

Just for a starter there must be a world of difference between having you credit worthiness assessed in an eye to eye conversation by a lending officer and today’s having a computer read you number. At least it must be affecting the moral implications in the “to pay or not to pay”.

I suspect we will also see a growing reluctance from the high interest rate payers to remain in that group since if they can service their debt adequately at those rates they might feel they are de-facto meriting lower rates.

Risk based pricing, which is similar to placing persons that after some doubtful genetic test are presumed to be especially exposed to an illness in a separate insurance pool, could be causing much of the growing social inequality that is currently attributed by some to globalization. Risk profiling, for a discriminatory purpose, is prohibited in most spheres of our social relations, except in lending where it is very much cheered, by most.