Running Low on SSNs?

Remove all ads!

I can only address this directly to members of the US, but I imagine a similar identity statistic is present elsewhere.

Nearly every person in the US is assigned a unique 9-digit Social Security Number (SSN), usually shortly after they are born these days. The current population of the US is a about 308 million people. Of that, about 12 million people are here illegally, so that leaves around 296 million people who should have legal SSNs. Your SSN is a 9-digit number, meaning there are 1 billion different numbers available. So about 30% of all possible SSNs are currently in use.

However, it's not just the ones of people living in the US today that have been issued. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has been around for more than 70 years, and pretty much everyone who had a job since 1940 - even if they are long since dead - had their own unique SSN as well. So people's parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc. (provided your family has lived in the US that long) had SSNs that were unique to them, including people who may be dead for 50 years or more. Heck, many people who were born in the 1800s eventually got SSNs. This has to include at least tens of millions of people, if not into the hundreds of millions.

So the obvious question is, are we close to running out of unique SSNs? AFAIK, we do not re-use the SSNs of dead people. While I seriously doubt that there have been 1 billion SSNs issued to date, it would not surprise me if the vast majority of SSNs have been used to this point. I would hazard to guess if you randomly made up a 9-digit number, the chances are high that it would be someone's SSN - maybe not someone currently alive, but someone's. At the very least, running out of SSNs is an eventuality, and not in the too-distant future.

I'm researching this now, trying to figure out US population and mortality rate by year - it's a rather time consuming process - I'll post updates as I get them.

 

Oh, and I thought you were expressing concern of the US running low on nuclear attack submarines ...

 

I'm oddly disappointed. I thought this was going to be a thread about submarines.

Edit: Now I'm even more concerned as I'm thinking like Ragusa

 

EDIT: OK, I have roughly calculated the number of people who have died in the US since 1940. I took 10-year population averages for the 1940s, 50s, 60s, etc., and I multiplied that by the mortality rate, and then multiplied that by 10 to get the number of people who died per 10-year span. I then did the same thing with the infant mortality rate, and subtracted that number out of the first number (I'm assuming they weren't assigned SSN).

I will concede that not everyone who has died since 1940 - even once I subtract the infant mortalities - had an SSN, but I imagine the vast majority of them did. The number I came up with is, IMO, shockingly low. If I calculated it right, there's only been 156 million deaths in the US since 1940. So the number of deaths in the last 70 years is only a little more than half as the number of people currently living in the US?

I'm looking over my stats, and in 1940, there were 132.1 million people living in the US. I think it's safe to assume the vast majority of them are now dead. (Note: I'm not saying the vast majority of people born in 1940 are now dead - just the vast majority of people who were alive in 1940 are now dead. A lot of them were already pretty old then. Anyone who has even in their 30s at the time would be over 100 if still alive today.)

So maybe I over-reacted a bit in my initial post. It would appear that only about half of all SSNs have been used to date. Historical data indicates that the US population doubles about every 60 years, so by 2070, we'll still only have used about 800 million SSNs. So it would appear unlikely that we run out in my lifetime, so maybe I sounded the alarm bell a bit too soon.

EDIT2: Oh, come on. How could we run out of attack subs? (Or, I suppose more appropriately, the nuclear ones.) We can build more.

 

Currently on a bridge trask (meaning a gap task between two larger tasks - not actually tasked to build a bridge) at work - not much going on. So.... uh.... yeah.

 

SSNs are also issued to visiting workers though. Even if you just spend a summer there during college holidays you'll get one and take one off the available numbers. So there'd be a lot more issued given how many people would come from abroad to work in the US. Not sure how you'd work it out but it could be enough to see them run out in your lifetime.

 

You know, there's a really simple solution to this problem. Add a digit! You go from 999,999,999 unique combinations (not counting 000-000-000) to 9,999,999,999. And that's just one digit.

 

Moving to a hexadecimal format could be fun too

 

Aldeth - Here's something more to consdier.

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/12/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-in-7.html

 

Hexadecimal would be fun, yes. And with more letters, you could spell things! Hi, I'm NOT-ALL-HRE. I swear, it's just a coincidence!

Anyway, with base 36 (26 letters and 10 numbers), it'd be a loooooooooooooooooooong time before we ran out.

 

Actually we ARE losing the ability to efficiently build SSN's. Much of the shipbuilding workers have moved on to other job. Shipbuilding is as much an art as a technology and it takes years to acquire the necessary skills to build a submarine. It is turning into a vanishing art just as building battleships is no longer a capability we have (or anyone for that matter).

 

I thought the reason we didn't build battleships anymore was because they don't have any capabilities that would be considered unique. There's nothing they can do that other ships/subs cannot also do.

 

Same here.

I hear that in China they can built them cheaper.

 

But there is not much demand for submarines made out of lead.

 

Oh definitely. But then, the US still has by far the best and largest SSN fleet in the world. And we are speaking of 50+ SSN (Virginia, Seawolf and Los Angeles classes) in service, and approx about what the rest of the world has combined, allies included. It's 'decline' on a high niveau, and 'decline' only when compared to cold war levels. I wouldn't exactly call the US SSN fleet 'weak'. The only thing that's reducing the US ability to build these subs (in numbers i.e. at a higher rate, keeping people sharp in their shipbuilding skills and retaining the expertise of the shipyards) are the prohibitively high costs.

On the other hand you are right, for instance, the US cannot export non-nuclear submarines any more because they don't build them any more. Conventional subs are as much a speciality technology as nuclear subs are. The last conventional sub class they built, the Barbel class, was excellent (and inspired excellent Dutch and Japanese subs), but only four units were built, likely because the submariners wanted an all nuclear fleet and saw them as competitors for limited funding.

The US could probably have three SS for one SSN. They don't want that, probably because SS lack the gold plating, and, since they, capable as they are, would compete for funds with SSN. The Brits killed the Upholders (and eventually sold them to Canada) for the same reason, to protect their Trafalgars and to make sure Astute would be built.

In current exercises conventional subs excel in the anti-shipping and the anti-submarine role alike (routinely 'killing' US aircraft carriers and nuclear attack submarines); the only thing they lack in comparison to nuclear subs is endurance, range and speed, but what they have is already substantial - and what they lack can to an extent be compensated for with stealth, lower costs and greater numbers. New air independent propulsion systems further improves these already impressive capabilities. SS are quite good enough for many of the traditional sub tasks, and in some cases superior to SSN (as in operating in shallow waters close to an enemy coast, you just don't do that as good in a 6000 ton behemoth as in a 1350 ton sub like the U-212, or a ~450 ton sub like Germany's U-206 A). Most of the action nowadays has been in coastal regions. SSN are unmatched in their ability to hunt down SSBN under the Arctic ice cap, but that's not what SSN are doing in their day job nowadays.

Best export designs nowadays come from Germany and Sweden, and Russia, and France. The Japanese subs are excellent, but they don't export. The Dutch designs are excellent as well, but haven't seen much export (but for Taiwan). The US isn't even a player.

 

I saw this post and I thought to myself, just start using an alpha-numeric system once you run out of numbers (that's better than Hex, as Hex only grants you a few letters). I'm glad that has already been ready addressed, and it's good that there are apparently no immediate catastrophes related to SSNs on the horizon.

"I'm sorry Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, but we cannot deliver your baby. We simply don't have any unique numbers left to give him."

On another note, are we talking about submarines here? Am I somehow off topic!

 

It's an interesting article. It seems that most of the instances of a SSN being attached to more than one person is due to clerical error. You give you SSN to someone at a bank, job, etc., and the person who enters the number either mistypes it, transposes two digits, etc. Sometimes, such an error results in entering a number that is already used by someone else.

My brother and I are two of those people. My parents didn't apply for a SSN for me when I was born - they didn't have the service at the hospital at the time. Two years later, when my younger brother was born, they had ameans to apply for a SSN right at the hospital, so my dad applied for one for both my brother and I at the same time, which resulted in us getting consecutive SSNs (first 8 digits identical, with the 9th digit off by 1).

Since we obviously have the same last name, it would be easy if someone mis-typed it that they would seem to correct last name pop up on their computer screen, and proceed. The only reason I know this happened is when I applied for an apartment about 10 years ago. They asked me if I currently lived in Erie, PA. While I have never lived there, my brother did at that time. The same thing happened to my brother when he moved into an apartment in Hershey, PA. They asked him if he lived in Edgewood, MD. He never had, but at the time, I was.

 

That Virginia class looks nice.