How is it possible that the db contains records with such a vital datum missing? How is it possible that SSNs aren’t unique? I can’t come up with an explanation that doesn’t boil down to either negligence or fraud.
- whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions, likely close to half a billion (500,000,000);
- which has been maintained for now just about exactly a hundred years;
- which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country (not predates their systematization or encoding, but predates their reliable existence);
- which for a lot of its history has been maintained by hand,
should come to have occasional inconsistencies?'
So framed in knowledge of the Social Security Administration's history, I confide the question may reveal its own answer.
Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?
I understood GP as saying that this data is the best, cleanest data available. If nothing better exists, then record what you have. If that means some fields are blank, well then they're blank - you'll have to deal with this for country-sized databases, one way or another.
If that's what he was trying to ask, then I have, as detailed above, some notes on the attempt. But the myth that Social Security numbers were ever designed to work even half-assedly well as a single national ID number will never die, I suppose.
> Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
I can't really evaluate Newman's preprint [1] with much confidence, but it's only been out since September, and the Ig Nobel isn't peer review. Given also that the US state with the largest count of "supercentennarians" in Newman's data, Iowa, has a whopping 37 [2] of them, you're stretching this piece of un-peer-reviewed research far past anything it could reasonably be asked to support - hence, I suspect, the "are now believed" passive-voice weaseling in your claim quoted above.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3
[2] As given "1.25e-05" (p. 5, ibid.) or 12.5 per million, for a population just over three million. I've taken the liberty of rounding down on the assumption we are not meant to be counting fractional supercentennarians.
Peer review hardly means anything in these sorts of fields but seeing as you asked, the same guy has previously published peer-reviewed papers on fraud in Blue Zones research. Here's a press release with some references:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-wor...
> Dr Newman has previously disproved a 2016 study published in Nature on extreme-age research that accidentally rounded off a substantial amount of its data to zero. His peer-reviewed paper demonstrated that if corrected, this error eliminated the core findings claiming that human lifespan had a defined limit. Then, Dr Newman also countered a 2018 paper which made the opposite claim and, in the process, demonstrated a theoretical result predicting that patterns in old-age data are likely to be dominated by errors.
In investigating this theory, Dr Newman demonstrated fundamental and comedic mismatches between longevity claims and observed patterns. In the process, Dr Newman revealed that the well-publicised “Blue Zones” claims for the secrets of longevity are infallibly flawed.
Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. Poverty and pressure to commit pension fraud were shown to be excellent indicators of reaching ages 100+ in a way that is ‘the opposite of rational expectations’.
Maybe the data was there initially, but was deleted or lost for technical reasons, for example the date was incomplete, e.g. only the year of birth was known, but not the exact day and then was dropped to null as invalid during some kind of upgrade.
Maybe the data was not possible to enter into the system for technical reasons -- somebody didn't have access, something was down, the next shift was supposed to enter it once the system was back up. Maybe the same, but for process reasons, for example setting the date requires attaching the birth certificate and the birth certificate is lost.
Maybe the data was intended to be entered, but somebody forgot to actually do it, was waiting for birth certificate to be produced, but approved the benefits provisionally.
Maybe the birth certificate was shown to the official, but was of the wrong kind (handwritten extract, foreign document without consular legalization, damaged, illegible or incomplete date), so it was legit enough to start paying benefits but not legit enough to upload to the server. Maybe the date was conflicting with other records somehow. Maybe there was a court decision involved which determined eligibility for benefits but didn't determine exact date of birth.
The key point here -- the system allows for this kind of inconsistency (benefits are being paid, but the date is not present) and relies on a human process to eventually reach a consistent state, but the process failed and nobody really cares to rectify it as long as benefits are being paid.
That's assuming the benefits are actually paid to those people and the organization is not aware of this data issue and not investigating those people for fraud right now.
In an organization big enough there is always this kind of stuff happening (see "seeing like a bank"), which is tolerated as long as statutory task is not compromised.
It could also be that entries in the DB that are complete are not exactly correct or even belong to real people and of course there is fraud and corruption going on at least somewhere.
1. Run a complex process requiring human intervention to determine age where it is hard to determine
2. Enter the result of step 1 in the DB
And it's pretty obvious that 99.99% of the cost of this is coming from step 1. So I find it completely implausible that just tracking the results here, when a single error could potentially result in a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, is not cost effective.
It is not a major problem, it is a minor problem blown completely out of proportions by right-wing propaganda to cover much bigger problems caused by power-grabbing, tax-evading plutocracy.
> a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation
What would that process look like assuming you are e.g. trying to establish a DOB of a person born long time ago in a country that does not exist anymore under wartime conditions? Would that be cost effective?
But it also seems to fine to say "we aren't paying out any more money for any inconsistent records till the person comes forward and gives us the info to fix the records".
Obviously, if such a thing is done at scale, you need to have the staff to handle all the phone calls etc in a timely manner.
Someone born in a cabin in the middle of the woods 90 years ago is not neccesarily going to have "info" to fix their birth records (especially if non religious, so there are no church records). They could give you a date, but they aren't going to be in a position to prove it.
However if their name is "bobby tables" and their date of birth is 35th January 1806, and their only proof of that is a handwritten note with star signs, you disable it till either more proof is provided or a court makes a final decision.
What world do you people live in?
You do realise that the amount of "fraud" being discovered barely registers as a rounding error, right? That there is no significant amount being "wasted" here, right?
And none of that is about government efficiency or "saving money". Right?
Now that Elon has discovered all that fraud, how is the economy working out for you? How is the price of eggs doing? Have you finally become a millionaire now that all this red tape is gone? When is it supposed to happen? Why aren't you rich yet?
Old people vote. There is no way Congress goes along with a scheme like this.
That wasn't the question though. There could be this verified identity, good paper trail, bank records for decades etc. And still exact date of birth can be unknown and unknowable. Data lost to the mists of time.
Crazy how people will believe the weirdest customer service stories (and have no problem relating because we've all been in a kafkaesque situation) but the second they can bash "the administration and civil servants" or "random people who get a little bit of help and are NOT me", all of that goes out the window and things are supposed to be perfect and run smoothly.
The UK government then LOST their paper records.
In 2018, under the "hostile environment policy" set by Theresa May, the UK government started legally threatening these immigrants, and asked them to prove their settled status -- despite that same government having lost the only records that could prove that. The government then tried sending some "home" to countries they'd barely seen as a child and had zero family or friends in, and zero prospects.
This was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
> The March 2020 independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review, conducted by the inspector of constabulary Wendy Williams, concluded that the Home Office had shown "ignorance and thoughtlessness" and that what had happened had been "foreseeable and avoidable".
Ignorance and thoughtlessness. Foreseeable and avoidable. Does that sound similar to what's happening today?
The next question then becomes, how much does it cost to fix these inconsistencies? I'm also 99% confident that there's a small army of people that work to do so already, that is, fix and work with and around the inconsistencies.
All true, but you underestimate severity of the problem by a large margin if you assume that it is confined to the USA, a fairly affluent and bureaucratically stable country.
People in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. Refugees by definition don't come from situations with stability.
I mean that people in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. That the USA's record-keeping is better than many countries. And that many people go to the USA because of instability that is incompatible with good record-keeping. Same with UK, EU or any other western country.
Western culture makes more of a persons "Birthday" than some others.
I have edited the above comment to clarify.
According to the last US census that number was about 90,00.
Are you ok with sending social security checks to 20 million dead people?
If someone is marked alive incorrectly and is not receiving funds, I do not care if that data is bad. It's not ideal, but it's not an actual problem.
Do all those people have correct data? If not, correct that. If they do, then there's no fraud.
And even after that, even if the data is incorrect, it doesn't mean there's fraud. You have to go case by case to check if they're actually being collected and not just sitting somewhere.
So .. yes. There's potential for fraud, but we're not going to (accurately) know about the scale for a long time, and it's definitely not going to be on the scale of 20 million recipients.
It might not be missing, it also can be unknown and unknowable. There are people with their date of birth not recorded or recorded only approximately. It happens when the date is recorded on a piece of a paper in a building that then burns down or during natural or human-made catastrophes. Or it might not be recorded at all, or only some parts are missing (like the day of the month). Working for a different public administration, it's so common we have a special date type for that.
For example, if someone was registered with a birth date of 02/18/1458, or has a birth certificate with that on it. Bear in mind that humans make mistakes, and the people who issue birth certificates or type them up are humans. 02/18/1458 is patently wrong, but what do you do? Just guess that someone misread a 9 as a 4? What if the person in front of you is clearly too young (or old) to have been born in 1958?
You can't just revoke someone's social security because someone screwed up.
This is a weird question. How would you even go about finding out an unknown date of birth? Especially when it happened > 50 years ago and half the world away.
For whom is it "vital" ? Will it prevent me from going about my daily business?
See also: Why are so many people born on the 1st of January? It's a statistically impossible number.
A: Because they know their approximate year of birth, only.
It's not all that rare even in the West, especially for older people. Records get lost or never get collected in the first place.
Edit: the link below gives more information on ssns. SSNs so far been unique, but there are some issues
This error-code SSN was full of 0s, so obviously shared with others.
I wouldn't be surprised if some migrants waiting for confirmation of paperwork also had some shared temporary special-code SSN.
We can tell you've never touched a database or worked in tech.
Not that there is any shame in that. But the same way I keep my opinion to myself when my doctor gives me my diagnosis, people who have never handled a database really should follow that advice.
A local library can barely keep its database straight and it's very slightly easier than a database containing millions of people's information. Dozens of millions.