>>Probably not many remember the general amazement and dismay when it became a requirement that all born in this country be registered with the social security administration and given an ssn number. When that happened people were yelling and screaming that the next thing was big brother and computer chips buried in your skin to track your whereabouts...
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>I heard one of the authors of Freakonomics speak last night and he mentioned this. Specifically, he talked about the rule in '87 that you had to include a child's SS# on your 1040 to take the child as a deduction. It was done with the thought that some divorced folks were double-dipping, probably accidentally. Turned out that _millions_ of "children" disappeared from the tax rolls.

Just like the meds raid we had in early eighties. Our province being on the border to two Eastern bloc countries, and knowing Ceauşescu's population policy, it was suspected that our health insurance was paying for a lot of Romanian contraception and other stuff - the drugs were prescribed by the ton and sold across the border. So they invented recipes where the nurse had to enter codes - the doctor's ID, WHO (VII or VIII at the time) IDC code and the drug code, all in neat squares, one digit per.

Overnight, the drugs consumption dropped about 30%. Nobody knew that it's just the form and some printed code lists that exist - there was no software where those would be gathered, and for quite a while there weren't any computers yet. Nevertheless, it worked.