It does seem to me that logically, you have two choices:
1) Take the numbers at face value. In that case, you are predicting millions of accusations of fraud and an enormous number of prosecutions in the next year or two.
2) the situation is somehow more complicated, and most of those millions of records with 140+ ages do not represent fraudulent activity.
P.S. Mentioning the blue zones is incredibly silly. Those regions have modest numbers of individuals being reported in the 100-120 age range, which probably are fraudulent. None of those areas have millions being reported to be 140+. For instance, Sardinia had 13 reported centenarians per 100,000 population, which would be equivalent to ~39,000 centenarians in the US. So it's orders of magnitude less than this database shows.
(3) The data quality is so bad that there is no way to reliably know if a case is fraudulent or not without an investigation so expensive the ROI is negative, so everything remains unclear and unresolved forever.
That's usually how it goes with cases like these. Sometimes there are gangs who organize large scale fraud against the system and those might attract the attention of prosecutors, but people not reporting a death or double payment or similar isn't worth it. There might never be a clear answer to how the database got into this state. But the basic point stands that data quality for a critical dataset is really low in obvious ways, so what about all the non-obvious ways?
I mentioned blue zones because there are a lot of people on this thread who are really having a hard time believing there can be problems as obvious as people who have died but continue receiving payments in social security schemes. Blue zones is just an easily searchable keyword to learn more about other times when it's happened at scale, e.g.
In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died.
In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.
Puerto Rico’s government said in 2010 that it would replace all existing birth certificates due to concerns about widespread fraud and identity theft.
Obviously nobody is claiming the database reflects reality. Governments often have multiple data sources that are badly out of alignment. A census can give more accurate data, but that doesn't mean SS is synced to it. For instance, in the UK during COVID, more people came forward in some age ranges for a COVID vaccine than theoretically existed in the country at all. The UK's population data is so badly screwed up that people started using the quantity of NHS numbers issued instead to try and estimate it.
It would still be incredibly dishonest for Musk to say based on these numbers that this is the largest fraud in history.
> In 2010, the Japanese government announced that 82 percent of its citizens reported to be over 100 had already died.
> In 2012, Greece announced that it had discovered that 72 percent of its centenarians claiming pensions – some 9,000 people – were already dead.
Those numbers are three to four orders of magitude smaller than the ones we're discussing. Even factoring in the US being 30 times larger than Greece, we would have less than half a million pensioners if the proportion is similar.
The fact is, Elon found a number and waved it around like a red flag. And both of us are smart enough[0] to know that it doesn't mean what he says it means. But for some reason, you're insisting on defending the original deceptive tweets.
[0] I mean that genuinely! I've read your posts on garbage collection. And in this discussion I take it you're recognizing that those millions of records are likely overwhelming not fraudulent.
There's slippage of claims here, maybe. It's clearly not the case that every record with wrong data is fraudulent, and I don't think Musk believes or said that (though maybe he did, the dude tweets all the time). We certainly agree that it isn't the case.
The claims being made as I understand it are that the US SSDB has a lot of obviously wrong data in it, that bad age data is frequently a sign of fraud as proven by the audits of other countries, the age data is genuinely bad and not a result of misunderstandings, and therefore that Musk is likely correct when he argues there is a lot of fraud in the system.
What does "a lot" mean? It's vague but clearly not 100%. At the same time, if the numbers do transfer then less than half a million people fraudulently claiming pensions is quite a lot! And that would be just one source of fraud, one of the easiest to detect without effort. There will be plenty of people under the age of 100 who have died and weren't registered either, or people who never existed and so on. So whether we're talking millions, or a million, or even with a very restricted criteria less than half a million. In ordinary English, it's a lot.
I wasn't kidding about the "biggest fraud" line. It's not an exaggeration, he's just that full of crap.
Direct quote from Musk:
"Yes, there are FAR more 'eligible' social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA.
This might be the biggest fraud in history."[0]
The worst part is that there’s already a public report about these social security numbers. And it genuinely makes the SSA look bad, but it also makes clear that very few of these accounts ever received payments, and of those that did, they were generally cut off around a decade ago.[1] Does Musk know about the report? Does he care?
If someone wanted to come in and clean house and say "you have to do better" I can imagine there's a case to be made there. That's not what's happening, though.
1) Take the numbers at face value. In that case, you are predicting millions of accusations of fraud and an enormous number of prosecutions in the next year or two.
2) the situation is somehow more complicated, and most of those millions of records with 140+ ages do not represent fraudulent activity.
P.S. Mentioning the blue zones is incredibly silly. Those regions have modest numbers of individuals being reported in the 100-120 age range, which probably are fraudulent. None of those areas have millions being reported to be 140+. For instance, Sardinia had 13 reported centenarians per 100,000 population, which would be equivalent to ~39,000 centenarians in the US. So it's orders of magnitude less than this database shows.