How many living people are there residing within the United States who are Age 100 or older? How many 50 year olds are there? How many haven't yet seen their first birthday?
The U.S. Census Bureau's Population Division provides annual estimates that make it possible to answer these questions. For 2023, the most recent year for which the Census Bureau has published its resident population estimates by single year of age, the answers to these questions are, in order:
- There were 83,732 people living in the U.S. Age 100 or older.
- There were 3,904,908 people who were Age 50.
- There were 3,648,654 people under Age 1.
We've built the following chart to visualize the answers to these questions and to show how many people are there living in the U.S. of each age in between.
We pulled this data shortly after Elon Musk published a table from a Social Security Administration database indicating over 20 million "living" Americans Age 100 or older. Which is quite a bit more than the 83,732 the Census Bureau estimates there were in 2023.
The million dollar question, or possibly the billion dollar question, is how many checks did Social Security pay out to people living in the U.S. whose Social Security numbers are recorded in this database who are Age 100 or older in 2023? If that number is reasonably close to 83,732, there's probably no real problem here other than sloppy and incomplete record-keeping by the Social Security Administration. But if they sent out significantly more retirement benefit checks than that number to people their database says are Age 100 or older, then there's a major scandal brewing. In that case, there's a very good chance those are improper payments being made and the people receiving the checks probably aren't the people the Social Security Administration thinks they are.
No matter what, the Social Security Administration will have some serious housekeeping to do. If they're lucky, it will only just involve cleaning up their database.
Reference
U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division. Annual Estimates of the Resident Population by Single Year of Age and Sex for the United States: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2023 (NC-EST2023-SYASEXN). [Excel Spreadsheet]. June 2024.
Labels: data visualization
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