Robert J. Myers, Actuary Who Shaped Social Security Program, Dies at 97
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.”
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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.”