Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informative reading.

In a recent article in Nomika Epilekta [“Are university rankings useful?”] we referred to the global bad habit of making evaluations of universities on the basis of various canned criteria, with the result that classifications and scores emerge which reflect only part of the truth and often mislead.

Something similar is true of the other fashion that has prevailed: the assessment of the creditworthiness of individuals, businesses and even states by various odd agencies which, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of eccentricity, compete over who will have the most difficult name, names that only initiates can remember so they can prove their cleverness to the many, the uninitiated. In recent years this fashion has also entered Greece in the form of Teiresias.

I must admit that the name is very successful, because just as far as the oracle of a seer is from true knowledge of the future, so far can evaluations of this kind be from knowledge of the past and the present. In essence these are exactly oracles, intended to replace analysis and thought, especially the processing done by the right hemisphere of our brain: synthesis into a whole, and not merely the robotic counting of various quantities, which is done by our left hemisphere.

The result is that the oracles of Teiresias, while capable even of destroying a business or a household, rarely have any relation to the real financial situation, which has not been properly assessed so that we may have a complete picture based on judgment and not on formal criteria. If you did not pay a bill, you are considered not creditworthy, regardless of the reasons why that bill was not paid. You enter the registers of bad payers, with the well-known consequences.

In Sweden, where the Teiresias system has been applied systematically for at least twenty-five years, when you ask for a loan and the conditions are met, within half an hour you have left the bank with the loan amount deposited in your account. In the same time they have even opened an account for you if you do not have one, such is the efficiency. Yet the main condition, apart from proving sufficient income, is that you not be in the registers of the Swedish Teiresias; if you have been blacklisted in another country it does not count. The bank checks that register on the spot, and if it finds you there, even if you have Rockefeller-level income you will not only fail to get the loan, but they will suddenly treat you as if you were the head of the mafia, so much social discredit has the blacklist acquired.

This blacklisting usually lasts three years. When, therefore, the expiry date has passed, the next day you go back to the bank and not only will you get the loan, but they will treat you politely as a valuable customer. You are no longer a mafioso, nor a bad payer, nor a scoundrel; all that was until yesterday.

This example shows that we have entered dangerous paths. Here we have replaced not only real economic analysis but also moral judgment with an automatic mechanism, like an electronic computer. For when you have Rockefeller-level income and an impeccable record, but you entered the blacklist because someone issued an unfounded payment order against you and for some reason you missed the deadline to object, then we are speaking of clouded judgment at every level.

Unfortunately, not only Teiresias but the banking system as a whole tends to function in this way. Decisions are not made on the basis of purely economic criteria and economic analysis, but on bureaucratic and formal criteria. Whether banks are private or state-owned, this methodology is the same, with the result that the banking system is now evolving into one of the most stubborn guardians of bureaucracy.

What does a bank gain in this way? First, power over the customer, who no longer feels like a customer wishing to buy a service so that the shop called a bank may make money from him. Instead, he feels like a subject who needs to prove that he is a good poor fellow and to plead or use connections. The bank is now his boss and the relationship is plainly unequal. Second, it is relieved of that terribly difficult thing called thought, analysis, synthesis, since decisions are now made robotically.

This kind of “analysis” of economic and also moral reality whenever we need to make a decision concerning important transactions in the market and in society more generally rests on the tendency shown mainly by the Protestant peoples of Northern Europe in recent years to evaluate things only with the left hemisphere of their brain. In essence, it is one of the many mechanisms aimed at avoiding and replacing thought with robotic procedures and routine. We simply measure certain quantities, and that is the end of it.

The dangers are great. Apart from the social absurdities already observed, where businesses and households are unjustly destroyed by the oracles of Teiresias, today we also see rating agencies, which also function like Teiresias with dry quantitative estimates of certain figures, damaging whole states. By lowering the credit rating of Italy and Spain, as happened recently, they not only damage those countries but also open the road for speculators to do their work, which is to keep filling their coffers. Whether these evaluations are also made with ulterior motives I do not know; I leave that to others who know better. But the result is certainly sinister.

Gerasimos Fourlanos (www.fourlanos.com)