Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gruez 885 days ago
How is it easy? How do you make sure the old person in front of you is really the pensioner and not her 80 year old daughter?
2 comments

And how’s a photo with a newspaper better?
Sorry, but we have not doing this for centuries if not milleniums for trillion of people before us?
We haven’t at this scale, no.

For most of human existence, you would already know if Bob or Jane was dead, since you’d have gone to their funeral or knew someone who had.

Sorry, I am missing something. Are you saying that the people that are dying every day, in the developed world, is uncounted by a big margin? What is that margin?
Japan estimated 5% in 2006, for one data point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi
Japan is Japan [1]. What is your data point for European and American countries?

[1] https://hansondoremus.com/2014-4-28-there-are-four-kinds-of-...

You’re asking for the concrete number of people who are dead, but the folks in the system don’t know it?

And where there is a financial incentive for recipients to hide this fact?

That’s about as (actually) knowable as how many folks in LA are drug dealers.

We know some are, clearly, since they’ve been caught. But that is not going to be even close to correct in real terms, because they are of course going to work very hard to not get caught.

https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/fact-sheet-how-much-wast...

States “ According to the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General, in 2013 just over 1,500 deceased individuals in all age ranges were still receiving benefits. They account for only $15 million in improper benefit payments.”

And “According to the Social Security Administration, all improper payments, including payments to the deceased and the very old, are estimated at about $3 billion per year.”

That is in the US. And the SSA is really aggressive in trying to track down these issues. Most other pensions don’t have their resources or the type of political pressure they get.

I’ve personally overheard enough discussions among old folks to know that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg though, anymore than arresting Bob for possessing coke is ‘stopping drug trafficking’.

The behavior you are engaging in is known as "moving the goalposts." It involves changing the criteria or rules during an argument or discussion, ("in the developed world" -> "for European and American countries") making the original point or argument difficult or impossible to address satisfactorily.
That blog post doesn't actually talk about Japan except for in a passing quote, which itself (as best I can tell) specifically refers to economic growth and very well might be apocryphal in the first place.[0]

[0] https://slate.com/business/2012/04/the-four-types-of-economi...

For most of human history pensions and social security did not exist, so there was little incentive lie.
bureauracratized welfare and government identification is relatively new