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Alicorn comments on Be Happier - Less Wrong
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WHYYYYY??????
Because credit card companies are financially disincentivized to send cards with instructions reading "How To Use Your Credit Card: Borrow our money for free by purchasing things you can afford and paying down your full balance on time, every time, leaving us to profit solely from merchant fees."
Among other causes.
We get to empirically test this assertion, because the new credit card regulations of the last few years have much more detail about the benefits of paying in full, on time.
If they're long, complicated, and/or in fine print, I don't think that's a test of my assertion.
The first page of the credit card bill now says how much it will cost in interest if you pay only the minimum, or only pay the minimum amount necessary to eventually pay off the debt (along with when that pay off would occur).
It's fairly transparent. Which isn't to say that it overcomes (or attempts to overcome) cognitive biases people have about the relative size of different numbers. But it isn't hiding the ball.
Fair enough; I haven't seen one personally (I have a credit card but don't use it much and I think it would send the bills to an old address still if I did) but I'll call it at least a partial test of the assertion on your say-so.