We messed up somewhere along the way

how come towns and villages existed for tens of thousands of years with no credit scores?

They did. Even before money was a thing, there was an unofficial tally kept by members of a community as to who contributed and who didn't. Non-contributing members would lose social status and potentially access to the community's resources.

You don’t need one when there’s only like a hundred to a thousand people in a village. But when you have literally billions of people across the globe, you’re gonna need a more sophisticated way to measure people’s credibility.

how come towns and villages existed for tens of thousands of years with no credit scores?

They did have them, just under a different name/implementation.

But the concept of collective trust is pretty core to any herd animal.

Modern credit scores mostly just differ in the fact you can obtain that info lightning fast, instead of by having to write a letter and waiting several weeks for the response on "can we trust this person's claims? Can you vouch for them?"

fishermen / traders would have accounts at local shops allowing their families to have things while they were away at sea for months or even years at a time, and pay them back when they returned.

Most of society as a whole is due to it.

Herd behavior as a whole primarily comes about due to food scarcity strategies to improve security.

When groups of animals fight over food, they naturally form into larger groups to improve odds of success and then share the spoils.

In low scarcity scenarios typically you see herd behavior rarer and rarer, there's little need to form a pack if you have all your needs already met, why bother?

Credit scores weren't called "credit scores" of course.

It would be along the limes of having the church or kingdom or etc's blessing, or paperwork to indicate you are with a given trade guild or etc.

It came in many different flavors, as many different countries... exist....

Point being that there *were * long before mechanisms for many different villages and cities having an agreed upon mechanism for discerning "can we trust this person?"

The principle of Identification was a very early on problem that needed solving.

If some rando rrolls into your village claiming to be a trader selling official wares of (some other village), how would you know they were who they said they were?

Typically signed documents with an official seal was a good first start.

And that network of everyone agreeing so-and-so networks seals were associated with good traders that sold good wares is your first concept of a "credit score".

In reality existing banks today assigning people credit scores is just an abstracted system around the fundamentally simple concept of a trade guild.

1. Everyone trusts the banks mechanisms for scoring.
2. The banks are involved in all major transactions and seal their official approval on them
3. And thus everyone participates in the trade guild by performing transactions with their legal tender.

This is sort of a fairly mandatory mechanism, and it's not even a terribly complex one tbh.

The only thing modern about it is the fact we store people's scores digitally and can share that info all across the world instantly. Which is very handy.

But it literally is just a number that evaluates "how much can you trust this person with lending them stuff" based on past times they've been trusted with important shot that got lent to them.

Unga lent Bunga his stick.

Bunga broke Ungas stick.

Unga tells whole village what happened.

Now no one will lend Bunga a new stick.

Credit score.

many famines we have in history aren’t because of sociopolitical issues

That's increasingly untrue, particularly in the last century. To say we've got some kind of food shortage, you have to ignore everything from the Irish Potato Famine (in which English storehouses were so full of wheat that it rotted on the docks) to the Bengalese Famine (in which Churchill diverted foodstock away from East Indian ports as retribution for the wave of independence movements breaking out in the wake of WW2) to the US policy of buffalo hunting to near-extinction as a form of Indian removal to the engineered famines in Iraq and Palestine and North Korea and Cuba under international sanctions regimes.

What's more, where we've successfully ended the 19th century streak of famines, what we've seen is explicit socio-economic policy to improve foodstock production and distribution. This isn't an ecological problem (yet). It is entirely a logistics issue. We yield far more foodstock than we consume. And we've known we were producing more than we consume straight back to the early 20th century. Famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin even wrote a book on the subject, complete with a health amount of data analysis to support his theories, supporting the claim that then-modern wheat production should have already eliminated famine pretty much globally.

🤘

Yeah its actually really fun, trying old variants of things we are used to as well. Like much older breeds of bananas for example.

The usual supermarket vegetables and fruit are bred for cost effectiveness so much, that they barely resemble their predecessors in size or taste and sometimes the old ones are actually way better.

Well all that really means is you are locked out of building meaningful wealth forever

Then clearly my only path forward is to hold the world ransom for one million dollars.