SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Social Security numbers are not unique identifiers.
Really?
Nope.
If you got your social Security number before 2011, your first three digits represent the geographical location you were born in. You share those three digits with each of your siblings who were born in the same geographical location before in 2011. Go ahead and ask them.
If memory serves, and all we would really need to do is check a Wikipedia article, the middle two digits were done in some weird sequence, and then the last four were pseudo-random.
So basically, any people receiving their social security number any multiple of 100 people apart from another (prior to 2011) in the same geographic location have a 1 in 10,000 chance of having identical social security numbers.
Basically, if you live in a large city, you definitely have a few twinsies out there.
This was changed in 2011, because of this, but it is still not a unique identifier. It’s just more random.
This generally isn’t true. The SSA makes an effort to assign a unique number to each individual. It’s happened before where two people have accidentally gotten the same SSN, but they try to avoid this.
Thank you!
We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.
SS numbers can’t start with a 9, so you might wanna recalculate that.
Considering there are around 330M citizens right now, I think they ran out already and they’re probably recycling them.
The first SSNs were issued in 1936 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number
According to the death master file entry in wiki 111x10^6 SSNs died between 1962 and 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Master_File
That’s 1.982 x 10^6 x deaths x year^-1. Assume that number to be a constant during the period 1936-2024
1.982 x 10^6 x deaths x year^-1 x (2024-1936) x year = 174.4 x 10^6 deaths
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States there’s 335.9 x 10^6 residents, but I can’t tell if they are citizens with SSNs, but I’m going to assume that for now.
So (335.9 + 174.4) x 10^6 is 510.3 x 10^6 spent SSNs.
According to the same demographics wiki article the birth rate is 11 births per 1000 population. Death rate is 10.4 deaths per 1000 population. Because I’m just doing back of the envelope estimation for fun, while trying to manage my hangover in the early afternoon, I’m not going to create an exponential function to describe population growth. Instead I’m going to only consider future the US population a constant and not consider the 200 x 10^3 annual net growth (it only affects the next year’s growth by 120 anyway)
With all of that BS out of the way, at the present birthrate the US requires 3.695 x 10^6 new SSNs annually. The total amount SSNs in the current scheme is (10^9) - 1. I’m going to be leaving out the -1. 10^9 total SSNs - 510.3x^6 spent SSNs leaves 489.7 x 10^6 SSNs available. 489.7/3.695 is 132.5.
So in conclusion, assuming a constant population, the US can go for another 132.5 years with the present scheme without having to reuse any SSN.
SSN’s are also given out to immigrants as well though, so that’s a whole other population of people outside of just natural born citizens to account for. The US awards around one million green cards annually, though I don’t know what the historical numbers are.
SSN’s are also given out to immigrants as well though
Oh snap! Thanks for bringing that up. Adding another million each year, and assuming a constant green card rate since before WW2(!), adds another 88 million spent SSNs. With an additional million green cards annually, that makes the calculation (1000-510.3-88)x10^6 SSNs /4.695 x 10^6 SSNs/year = 85.6 years.
So the US has until about the end of the century to figure it out.
Plenty of time to put off thinking about it until the last possible minute.
An American tradition
Meh, why do today what you can put off until it’s someone else’s problem?
It’s not even like you leave for future you, that guy hates you already^1 you leave it for someone entirely unknown. They won’t even know who to blame.
^1 Shayne Smith banned from karate reference.
Bummer, superscript doesn’t work in any client, does it work for anybody else? Come to think about it, how stupid am I, I’ve used ^ extensively in this fucking thread smh
How about dead SSNs between ‘36 and ‘62? Great work on the calculation but all I’m saying is, if the government ran out of numbers and recycled them already, nobody would know about it. The whole situation is ridiculous if you ask me and there’s no database of SSNs you can compare it to. Weirdly enough, official government departments straight up lie about things and easily get away with it heh.
How about dead SSNs between ‘36 and ‘62?
That’s why I extrapolated from the 1962-2018 numbers and came to a total number of 174.4 x 10^6 deaths.
The whole situation is ridiculous if you ask me.
Oh I agree. But it’s a classic issue with old databases. We had a similar issue awhile back with license plates in Denmark. The plates had been assigned inefficiently by incrementing parts annually. So we had unused ranges as well as disused plates. But somehow nobody had made a list of these plates.
Office Space 2
“When the Overflow was noticed, everyone started updating their systems. And this causes people to fall through the cracks. Usually those people are just written off, but what we do is we take those people for ourselves.”
“So you’re stealing people?”
“No we’re not stealing people. They don’t have SSNs so they aren’t technically people?”
Maybe they can just add one digit, or start using A-F
Probably recycle the oldest ones because those people will be long dead by then.
But let’s not kid ourselves, everyone paying into SS right now is never going to get the benefit of it because it will have collapsed.
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They are regularly recycled.
Not according to the SSA’s Q&A:
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
Haha, your reply beat out mine by only a minute.
The maximum possible combinations given the current rules set forth by the SSA is 888,931,098.
The United States population on October 11, 2024 is: 337,248,197 The estimated population of humans on earth is 8,078,345,740The social security administration has said they have enough SSNs to last for about the next 70 years, and will address this issue in the future.
But people have been born and died, no? I’m sure total used is closer to something like 500-600 million?
This does not agree with what the Social Security Administration has published:
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
