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" Likewise, when the credit card took off in California in the 1960s, driven by Joseph Williams of Bank of America, there was nothing new about buying on credit. It was as old as Babylon. There was not even anything new about charge cards. Diner’s Club had been issuing cards for the convenience of restaurant users since the early 1950s and department stores for longer than that. What the BankAmericard achieved, especially once it emerged as Visa from the chaos of the mass mailings in the late 1960s, under Dee Hock’s reinvention, was the democratisation of credit. The electronic possibility that your card could be authorised for a purchase anywhere in the country or even the world was a powerful lubricant to specialisation and exchange in the economy of the late twentieth century, allowing consumers to express their choice to borrow against future earnings when it made sense. There was, of course, irresponsibility, but the credit card did not lead, as most intellectual grandees had feared, "
― Matt Ridley , The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves