TABLE 1—

Trade-Offs Between Credit Scores and Common Measures of Socioeconomic Position

	Consumer Credit	Income	Wealth	Education
Responsiveness to life events	Sensitive to short- and long-term economic changes; reported monthly	Changes infrequently	Varies over life but generally increases	Often stable after early adulthood
Data access	Proprietary; based on unpublished formulas; self-report can be collected in surveys	Self-report widely available	Self-report widely available	Self-report widely available
Data availability	∼20% of adults do not have credit history; large volume of credit data across the nation	Self-report missing in < 33% in population-based US health surveysa	Missing in < 20%; underreported in high-wealth householdsb; many have no or negative wealth	Widely available with < 1% missinga; applicable to nearly everyone
Data interpretation	Quantifiable score capturing access to additional capital to address health; scores across bureaus have different meanings	May not be predictive of purchasing power	Difficult to ascertain accurately for those with a mix of assets	Easy to ascertain but has different returns and meanings across cohorts and cultures

^aBased on the US National Health Interview Survey, as reported in http://www.stat.columbia.edu/∼gelman/stuff_for_blog/s6.pdf.

^bBased on missing at least one item used in wealth calculations in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, as reported in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5351882.