The arbitrary deadline: Bureaucracy, longevity, and the contested value of the retirement age

“ Some minds are young and growing at seventy while others seem to cross some invisible deadline at forty. But of all this we have no settled criteria and the age of customary or enforced retirement is arbitrary, though very diversely fixed by various industrial concerns, pension systems, etc., without regard to mental age or youth. In fact, the world has so far attempted almost nothing that could be called a curriculum for the later years of life—physical, intellectual, moral, social, or even hygienic or religious, after the very variable period when the prime of life is reached and passed. ”

“ I—Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data are available—Actuarial and other mortality tables—Expectation of life and death-rate at different ages—Longevity and fecundity—Death-rate in different occupations—Irving Fisher’s ideas on longevity—The population problem—Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle Ages—Diversity of statistical methods and results. ”

“ Now, it costs no more to raise a man capable of living eighty years than it does to grow one who has the capacity of living only forty. Health means increased vitality and makes life, in Mallock’s phrase, better worth the living, for health is the first wealth. We can do much to raise American vitality.
Fisher adds127 that in the United States the general death rate has steadily fallen for several decades, as is common in all civilized countries. ”

“ The disease which afflicts bureaucratic governments, and which they usually die of, is routine. ”

“ The parties are at odds respecting the existing superannuation of railway employees. Petitioners say it is much greater than that found in the heavy industries. Respondents assert it is less, and the court below so found. The finding is challenged as being contrary to the evidence. We may, for present purposes, assume that 'superannuation' as petitioners use the term, i.e., the attainment of 65 years, is as great or greater in the railroad industry than in comparable employments. It does not follow, as contended, that the man of that age is inefficient or incompetent. ”

“ Both we and our civilization now so checked, disoriented, and misled by immaturities are in such crying need of a higher leadership that is not forthcoming! We are suffering chiefly from unripeness. The human stock is not maturing as381 it should. Life is so complicated that the years of apprenticeship are ever longer and harder, so that we are exhausted ere we become master workmen in our craft and the rapid age turnover this involves robs us of too many of the choicest fruits of experience. ”

“ But in man the old individual becomes a storehouse of acquired or traditional knowledge, and wisdom has, for the first time, a distinct value in organic association.129 It was in this way that the reproductive period was shortened, or perhaps we had better say that life was prolonged beyond it. In civilized society the old are still members of the species, not aliens or enemies. When a people begins to have a literature or a religion and a large body of mores as social inheritance develops, the value of old age increases. ”

“ They assert that it would be unthinkable to retire a man without pension, and add that attempted separation of retirement and pensions is unreal in any practical sense, since it would be impossible to require carriers to cast old workers aside without means of support. The supposed impossibility arises from a failure to distinguish constitutional power from social desirability. The relation of retirement to safety and efficiency is distinct from the relation of a pension to the same ends, and the two relationships are not to be confused. ”

“ or we may find, by our own unhappy experience, that there is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny, and that arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. ”

“ The concept that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperative when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and, if allowed to flourish, would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our Government. ”

“ The term “participating employment-based plan” means an eligible employment-based plan that is participating in the reinsurance program. (D) The term “retiree” means, with respect to a participating employment-benefit plan, an individual who— (i) is 55 years of age or older; (ii) is not eligible for coverage under title XVIII of the Social Security Act; and (iii) is not an active employee of an employer maintaining the plan or of any employer that makes or has made substantial contributions to fund such plan. (E) The term “Secretary” means Secretary of Health and Human Services. ”

“ As the shadows lengthen she believes the climacteric should supervene without any break at all with the prime of life, although there are really two curves that run a very different course, one of physical strength and another of experience. When one stands on the summit of his years, he is buoyed up by great plans for life; but when he retires, there is nothing ahead save death and this involves a great and often102 critical change. The successful life is one that solves the problems that meet it here without patheticism and without self-delusion. ”

“ We cannot agree that these ends if dictated by statute, and not voluntarily extended by the employer, encourage loyalty and continuity of service. We feel bound to hold that a pension plan thus imposed is in no proper sense a regulation of the activity of interstate transportation. It is an attempt for social ends to impose by sheer fiat noncontractual incidents upon the relation of employer and employee, not as a rule or regulation of commerce and transportation between the states, but as a means of assuring a particular class of employees against old age dependency. ”

“ Age is comely in coach, chairs of state, courts, and historical societies, but not on Broadway. We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count. One says a man is not worth anything until he is sixty. “In all governments the councils of power were held by the old—patricians or patres; senate or senes; seigneurs or seniors; the gerousia, the state of Sparta, the presbytery of the church, and the like, are all represented by old men.” Almost all good workers live long. ”

“ The sacred regard which Chinese pay to the claims of kindred secures to the patriarchs of respectable families ample support in the advanced and helpless stage of their pilgrimage; and charity often relieves poor septuagenarians whose relations may be unable to supply them with comforts or necessaries at their mature age. In China one’s feelings are not harrowed with the sad spectacle of an aged parent discarded by his children, and left to perish, unattended and unnursed, under a scorching sun, or on the banks of a rolling river. ”

“ In this part of China too, one frequently finds laborers more than seventy years of age working daily at their trades, and it is not unusual to hear of persons who have reached the age of ninety or more.
The intellectuality of the Chinese is made evident by so many obvious and weighty facts, that it seems strange that persons of ordinary intelligence and information should ever have questioned it. ”

“ The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty years—these fifteen golden years of plenty, the anabolic or constructive period, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and the credit is still good. ”

“ Thus many who are experienced and reliable may at their own election deprive a carrier of their services, enter another gainful occupation, cease to contribute to the fund, and go upon the pension roll years before the fixed retirement age of 65. The finding is that there are not less than 100,000 in the service of the carriers between 51 and 65 years of age who have had 30 or more years of service. The option is not extended to them to retire on pension in order to improve transportation, for the choice is the employee's to be exercised solely on grounds personal to himself ”

“ But he does regard that period as more nearly the normal length of human life than the commonly accepted limit of sixty-five or seventy, and as possibly attainable through the advance of medical science. Though he comes of a short-lived family and all his brothers died at an age much younger than he has now attained, his health is unusually good for a man of seventy, and he is as hard-working and enterprising as ever. It is not the mere prolongation of life for which he is working, but the prolongation of the period of serviceable and enjoyable life. ”

“ The peace of mind, the cheerfulness of temper, the transfer of all anxiety from the human spirit to the strong Spirit of God, are very favourable to longevity. Insurance societies have made this discovery, and actuaries will tell you that in a very literal way the children of God possess the earth, while the wicked are cut off.
Yet no one thinks of measuring life only by days and years. To live long with the constant feeling that life is not worth living, or to live long with the constant apprehension of death, must be counted as a small and empty life. ”

“ The petitioners quote from a statement by the National Industrial Conference Board the following: 'More specifically, the efficiency of the individual workers is stimulated by the feeling of security and hopefulness that results when the individual is relieved of the fear of destitution and dependency in old age and by the sentiment of loyalty and good will fostered by the pension plan, which thus operates as a spur to the ambition of the worker and incites him to more intensive and sustained effort. ”

“ Counsel for the petitioners admit that 'it may well be' voluntary plans are intended to promote efficiency and safety by 'inducing loyalty and continuity,' and 'it could also be true that these means were ignored in the Retirement Act.' They add: 'Congress has deliberately chosen the means of providing old age security for all railroad employees, measured by years of service, but not dependent upon continuity of service with any particular carrier, as is required under the existing railway pension systems. ”

“ An attempted distinction as to pension measures for employees retired by reason of age, because old age is not in itself a consequency of employment, is but superficial. The common judgment takes note of the fact that the retirement of workers by reason of incapacity due to advancing years is an incident of employment and that a fair consideration of their plight justifies retirement allowances as a feature of the service to which they have long been devoted. ”

“ The first is that old people’s hold on life is so precarious that medical care is less likely to be rewarded with success than at earlier stages of life. The fact is that normal and healthy age is not only immune to many diseases common to middle life but often has exceptional recuperative powers, while even under present conditions the percentage of deaths is not so very much increased at seventy. Physicians who specialize in gerontology could do very much here. The other vicious tradition is that retirement or marked abatement of activity should occur at a certain age. ”

“ This view so commonly held, that heredity is the chief factor in longevity is doubtless correct in general. But it is fatalistic and directly tends to lessen the confidence of hygienists and physicians in the efficacy of all their methods of prolonging life in the aged. There is, we think, good reason to believe that there is a great and now rapidly growing number of exceptions to this so-called law, cases in which by conformity to right rules of living, age has been increased many years beyond that which our forbears attained. ”

“ Recognizing the fact that the essential cells in our241 body are inherently capable under proper conditions of living indefinitely, the problem that confronts us is whether environment or heredity has most to do in determining the actual length of life. Pearl163 concludes that the death rate of the earliest period of life is selective, eliminating the weak and leaving the strong, and that inheritance is “one of the strongest elements, if not indeed the dominating factor, in determining the duration of life of human beings.” ”

“ At fifty we lose headache and with every year liability to certain forms of disease declines. Now one success more or less signifies nothing because reputation is made. Success signifies much to a client but nothing to the old lawyer. Again, another felicity of old age is that it has found expression. Things that seethe in us have been born, so that the throes and tempests subside. “One by one, day by day, he learns to cast his wishes into facts.” ”