Germany set its first pension age at 70, for a population whose average life expectancy was roughly 40.
On May 24, 1889, the German Reichstag passed the Old Age and Disability Insurance Act, creating the first national pension system in the world.1 The program was the work of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had been pushing social insurance legislation since 1881, when Emperor Wilhelm I sent a letter to Parliament declaring that those disabled by age and invalidity had "a well-grounded claim to care from the state."2
The pension age was set at 70. Bismarck himself was 74 at the time. Average life expectancy in Germany hovered around 40 years, though that figure was heavily skewed by infant mortality.3 The number of Germans who would actually live long enough to collect the pension was small by design.
Bismarck's motives were strategic as much as humanitarian. The Social Democratic Party was gaining strength among industrial workers, and Bismarck saw state-administered insurance as a way to weaken socialist appeals without conceding political power.4 In his own speech to the Reichstag, he responded to critics who accused him of socialism by saying the label did not trouble him if the policy served the state.
In 1916, twenty-seven years after the original law and eighteen years after Bismarck's death, Germany lowered its pension age to 65.5
When the United States designed its Social Security system in 1935, its planners surveyed existing pension programs and found that roughly half used 65 as the retirement age threshold. Actuarial studies confirmed that 65 produced a self-sustaining system at modest payroll tax levels. The U.S. Social Security Administration has explicitly stated that the American choice of 65 was not based on any European precedent.6
Britain's Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 had initially set its threshold at 70, lowering it to 65 for men and 60 for women with the National Insurance Act of 1946. By the mid-twentieth century, nearly every industrialized nation had adopted a statutory retirement age.7