"I just love to solve problems": how people who work at predatory lenders avoid thinking about the pain they inflict

Elena Botella worked at Capital One -- one of the US's leading issuers of subprime credit-cards -- for three years; in a fascinating first-person account, she describes how Capital One's youthful, smart, principled and caring staff created a culture in which the lives they were ruining were replaced by obfuscating jargon and interesting mathematics puzzles.

It's the predatory lending version of The Banality of Evil, in which the poorest Americans generated $23b/year in revenue from interest alone, which was funneled into good, challenging, well-paid jobs for everyday people who managed to never think about the harms they were doing.

She calls it "a conspiracy of silence" but it wasn't silence so much as metaphor and abstraction: by obsessing about the "physics" of debt and the mathematics that described it, the 3,000 white-collar workers at Capital One HQ were able to think of their work as an experimental science, in which they were using interventions (like randomly increasing the credit limits for some cardholders who were already struggling to make payments and measuring the total revenues that resulted) to uncover truths about the universe, not new techniques to ruin peoples' lives.

Capital Ones culture of experimentation also acted as a kind of buffer. Fast Company has reported that Capital One runs 80,000 experiments per year. As Christopher Worley and Edward Lawler III explain in the journal Organizational Dynamics, a bank like Capital One can randomly assign differing interest rates, payment options, or rewards to various customers and see which combinations are most profitable for any given segment of people.