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Age 65: ever wonder who picked it?
This article "Robert J. Myers, Actuary Who Shaped Social Security Program, Dies at 97" originally appeared in The New York Times on Feb. 26, 2010.
Robert J. Myers, an actuary who helped to create the Social Security program and to set America’s official retirement age at 65, died Feb. 13 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 97. The cause was respiratory failure, said his granddaughter Juliet Myers Wolfe.

In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Mr. Myers was unexpectedly offered a six-week stint on the Committee on Economic Security, a Roosevelt administration panel that was drawing up blueprints for America’s first comprehensive social insurance programs.
The six-week job turned out to be a career that spanned decades and placed Mr. Myers at the center of America’s great debates about the government’s role in the economy and how to create public safety nets affordably. Actuaries measure risks, and for much of his career Mr. Myers was concerned with the risk that the government might build an old-age program that promised more than it could deliver.

“His name and career are inseparable from the history of Social Security,” said Jeremy Gold, an actuary in New York who is active in the profession’s intense, if esoteric, debates about how to measure the costs of an aging population.
Congress and the Roosevelt administration wanted the Social Security program to be self-supporting — financed solely through payroll taxes and investment earnings, not general government revenues. Mr. Myers was asked to figure out the age at which people should stop working and start drawing benefits, to make the system pay for itself.
His initial calculations showed that the right age was 67. By the time the Social Security Act was signed into law in 1935, however, the age had been lowered to 65.
“Why is it 65? Why not?” Mr. Myers wrote in a 1992 memoir, “Within the System, My Half Century in Social Security.” “That age has been credited to — or blamed on — German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In truth, he didn’t do it.”
Bismarck in fact selected 70 as the minimum qualifying age when he established the world’s first social security system in 1889.

“Age 65 was picked because 60 was too young and 70 was too old,” Mr. Myers wrote. “So we split the difference.”
Mr. Myers served as Social Security’s chief actuary from 1947 to 1970, when he resigned in protest after publishing a signed article in Reader’s Digest, warning that “expansionists” in government threatened to “steer Social Security down a dangerously unsound financial course.”
He said he thought civil servants in the Social Security Administration had become politicized and were colluding with Democrats in Congress to undercut the Nixon administration’s initiatives. He considered himself a moderate Republican, but argued that actuarial science was supposed to be politically neutral.
Mr. Myers served as a consultant to various federal agencies and Congressional panels until 1982, when he was named deputy Social Security commissioner by President Ronald Reagan. He resigned again in protest the next year, citing “disastrous” meddling by the Office of Management and Budget, which had proposed changes in the program that Mr. Myers thought would penalize the poor.

In 1983, he was made the executive director of the National Commission on Social Security Reform, a bipartisan body led by Alan Greenspan that sought to correct a severe deficit in the program, caused by the weak economy of the 1970s.
The Greenspan Commission, as it was known, recommended a number of measures, like enrolling federal employees in Social Security and taxing the benefits. Congress also enacted a minority proposal, to phase in an increase in the Social Security retirement age, so that Americans born after 1960 must now wait until they turn 67 to get their full benefits. [But Medicare still kicks in at age 65, Lisa notes.]
The changes helped strengthen the program in the short term, but by the mid-1990s the financial imbalance had reappeared.

When policy makers then began to talk about “privatizing” Social Security as a painless fix, Mr. Myers was aghast.
“To me, the translation of the word ‘privatization’ is ‘destroyed,’ ” he told a Social Security Administration historian, Larry DeWitt, in an interview for the administration’s archives in 1996. “If it won’t do it immediately, it will do it inevitably.”
Robert Julius Myers was born in Lancaster, Pa., on Oct. 31, 1912, the son of Laurence B. Myers and Edith Hirsh Myers. He graduated from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
After moving to Washington in 1934 he lived at the Y.M.C.A. and met his wife, Ruth McCoy, known as Rudy, at a mixer with Y.W.C.A. residents. The couple married in 1938 and had two sons, Jonathan Myers of Philadelphia and Eric Myers of Wheaton, Ill., who survive him, as do three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Mrs. Myers died in 1995.

Mr. Myers thought that an accident of geography had landed him on the Committee on Economic Security in 1934. He had just received his master’s degree in actuarial science from the University of Iowa, could find no jobs and had moved back home to Philadelphia, when he received a letter from a former professor saying that of all his unemployed students, Mr. Myers lived closest to Washington, where there was a temporary job for a junior actuary.
“My principal qualification, therefore, was geography,” Mr. Myers said, “because most of the other students were from the Midwest.”

By Mary Williams Walsh