Bismarck set the retirement age at seventy, for a population that rarely reached it.
In 1889, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced the Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill in the German Reichstag, creating the world's first government-mandated retirement system.1 The initial qualifying age was set at seventy. Average life expectancy in Germany at the time was approximately forty-five years, though those who survived childhood lived considerably longer.2
The program was not designed as a reward for a lifetime of labor. It was a political strategy. Bismarck faced a growing Social Democratic movement and sought to bind the working class to the state through direct benefits. The retirement pension gave workers a reason to support the existing government rather than the socialists who promised a new one.3
In 1916, Germany lowered the retirement age to sixty-five, a number that would later become the global default.4
The American Social Security Act of 1935 adopted sixty-five as its threshold, influenced by both the German model and Committee on Economic Security actuarial analyses.5 The number propagated across the industrialized world, becoming the point around which pension systems, career expectations, and workforce planning organized themselves.
By the twenty-first century, the assumptions behind the original number had inverted. Life expectancy at birth in Germany exceeded eighty years. France, Japan, and dozens of other countries had raised or were debating raising their retirement ages. The number Bismarck chose to keep workers loyal to the state in 1889 remained, more than a century later, the organizing principle of how most industrialized societies think about when a person should stop working.