Sixty-Five

Sixty-five sits inside pension formulas, insurance tables, and the phrase 'retirement age' itself. The standard origin story points to Otto von Bismarck and the German Reichstag. The Social Security Administration, which administers the American number, says on its own history pages that this story is wrong.

Germany passed the first national old-age and invalidity insurance law in 1889. The old-age pension began at seventy, and the law took effect in 1891. The German system did not lower that age to sixty-five until 1916. Bismarck had been dead for eighteen years by then.

The pressure in America came from a doctor in Long Beach. Francis Townsend published his plan in 1933: two hundred dollars a month to every American over sixty who retired and spent the money within thirty days. Townsend Clubs spread by the thousands. Economists priced the scheme at roughly one and a half times all government spending in 1932.

The Committee on Economic Security, drafting the Social Security Act in 1935, picked sixty-five for duller reasons. About thirty state old-age pension systems were then operating, split between sixty-five and seventy. The Railroad Retirement Act of 1934 already used sixty-five. The committee took the lower of the two numbers in circulation and moved on.

The arithmetic was never grim. About fifty-four percent of American men who reached twenty-one could expect to reach sixty-five, and those who got there collected for nearly thirteen years. Congress abolished mandatory retirement by age for most workers in 1986. The number stayed anyway, sitting in everyone's head like a natural law.