When the question answers itself.

The problem is real:

The mythic promise of the American economy has always been a linear one: You learn a trade, work hard, and, one day, you’ll be rewarded in retirement.

Over the past decade — and particularly after the 2008 recession — that dream has been profoundly tested. According to a Harris Poll last spring, 78 percent of all Americans said they were “extremely” or “somewhat” concerned about their retirement savings. One in five, meanwhile, have no savings at all and, for those who do, approximately one-third have less than $25,000 saved for retirement.

But is the question, realistic?

What would a state level response look like?

My guess would have to be no.  I don't expect any response at the state level to this problem, and I can't even imagine one, quite frankly.

Some sort of state level response to low retirement savings rates?  I just don't see it occurring.

Which raises an interesting side question.  Having been able to watch certain occupations, it's odd how some retire and some don't, who could.

Doctors retire.  And that's a good thing as frankly they'd reach a point where their knowledge would start to become obsolescent and its absolutely necessary that their minds remain sharp.

That latter requirement is necessary for lawyers too, but as far as I can tell, most don't retire.  They could, but simply don't.  Some change career focuses, but they tend to hand on practicing until death as a rule.

Some ranchers retire, but many don't.  I can understand that.  When they do retire, it tends to be because the ravages of physical work have simply caught up with them.

There are exceptions to that, I'd note.  I've known ranchers who funded retirements by selling their lands, and that takes their entire families out of agriculture. . . forever usually.  That tends to come about however when nobody wants to step into their shoes.

Well anyway. This is a national crisis. But I don't expect it to be addressed anytime soon.  And I can't see the state addressing it at all.  Maybe it can't.

A few odds and ends to consider.

Recently here in the state we've seen coal miners who were depending on retirements from their mines potentially loose out as the pensions are going to be impacted.  What a horror that must be for those men and women.  Coal mining jobs were good jobs, and the men and women who opted to take them often opted to do so even though they could have gone on elsewhere and done something else.  It allowed them to stay home close to where they were from, and I don't blame them.

Something ought to be done for them. And it shouldn't be the case that young men from Kemmerer have to opt to go to Denver or Salt Lake for careers.  But more and more, that's the way things have gone.

I worry about people who have worked in jobs so long that it's become their life, although I sure see how that can happen.  I think that's what happens to a lot of lawyers.  They started off with lots of interests and by their mid 40s the law is the only one left, by necessity.  It's pretty much a 24 hour a day, seven days a week, kind of job.  I'm in my mid 50s and I work well over 40 hours a week at least six days a week, every week.  That's really common.  I can see how people who were interested in one thing or another let those interests drop away so by the time they were in their mid 60s, the law was the only thing left.  That's not good.

Not everyone falls into that.  People who are and do fall into that should take steps not to let that occur.  Some people really think its praiseworthy to say "well. . . he was till coming into the office everyday at age 120 and died at his desk. . .".  It isn't.

Indeed, a few years ago here there was an effort to raise the mandatory judicial retirement age up over 70.  The effort failed, and I'm glad it did. The Federal bench has no such requirement and at least as of a few years ago there were a couple of senior judges over 100 years old.  They didn't do much, but they were doing something, which is problematic in all sorts of ways unless you have wisdom approaching that of King Solomon and stamina approaching of that of a Sherpa guide. . . and you probably don't.

The American Serviceman During World War One: They were older than you think.

Or at least some of them were.

Dan Daly being awarded a French decoration during World War One.  Daly was born in 1873 and had entered the Marine Corps during the Spanish American War in 1899, at which time he was 26 years old.  He won his first Medal of Honor during the Boxer Rebellion.  He would have been 45 years old at the time he won his second Medal of Honor during World War One.  He'd serve on until age 56 and then retire, dying at age 63 in 1937.  In some ways, Daly is emblematic of the NCO core of the time.

It's really common to read the statement about all soldiers being "young" during World War One, and certainly there were a lot of young soldiers who fought in the Great War.  But they may not have been as uniformly young as a person might assume.

Let's start with a few facts about the armed forces of the United States during the second decade of the 20th Century.

To start with, the service was unusual in that it was one of the few American institutions which offered retirement at this point in history.  Other careers didn't.  It wasn't that a person was precluded from retirement, of course, but there was no Social Security or anything of the type, and the age of pensions for all workers was still in the future as well (and which has now become a thing of the past for many). So simply working until you died or became too infirm to work was common.

The service offered retirement, however, to an enlisted man at the time who had served for 30 years. The period and system was similar for officers.  Retirement after 30 years was at 75% of base pay, not a bad retirement for men, and they were all men, who were used to their existing level of pay.

To understand the impact of this, you next have to consider that the enlistment age for military service had been higher than it is today until just before World War One.  In 1875 Congress had acted to pass the following provisions regarding military enlistment in the Army:

Sec. 1116. Recruits enlisting in the Army must be effective and able-bodied men, and between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five years, at the time of their enlistment. This limitation as to age shall not apply to soldiers re-enlisting.
Sec. 1117. No person under the age of twenty-one years shall be enlisted or mustered into the military service of the United States without the written consent of his parents or guardians: Provided, That such minor has such parents or guardians entitled to his custody and control.
Sec. 1118. No minor under the age of sixteen years … shall be enlisted or mustered into the military service.

So enlistment was allowed down to age sixteen, but only with parents permission.  And enlistment was allowed up to age thirty five.

In 1899, in the wake of the Spanish American War, Congress changed Sec 1116 however to provide that you had to be eighteen years to enlist, and that still required parental approval.  It wasn't until 1916 that Congress changed the statutes so that parental approval was no longer required for those eighteen years of age.

If this seems odd, it frankly fit the concepts of adulthood at the time, and it oddly squares with the current psychological concepts of when somebody is fully adult.  At the time, and we've addressed this elsewhere, most men lived at home until married and even though many men left home for work prior to twenty years of age, many did not and lived at home. Barring enlistment under your own volition until age twenty-one made sense, just as originally allowing enlistment down to age sixteen under some circumstances did as well.

Put in context, therefore, most soldiers who had served long enough to retire were in their early 50s.  They had to retire at age 64, which was the maximum age a serving soldier could be at the time.

This was changed during World War Two to expressly try to weed out older men, particularly officers, who were regarded as no longer sufficiently mentally flexible for modern warfare. But that was to come later.  During World War One the 20 year retirement period for early retirement was in the future.  Barring injury, career soldiers had to serve 30 years in order to retire or make it to 40 years to retire on full pay.

That meant, therefore, that for soldiers who had enough time in to retire in the year we've been looking at, 1918, had entered the Army in 1888.

But another way, that means career soldiers who were eligible to retire had entered the Army prior to the Battle of Wounded Knee, which is generally regarded as the last significant battle of the Indian Wars (it's not the last battle).

Artillerymen of Wounded Knee, 1890.

By way of some examples, John Pershing, commander of the AEF, had entered the Army after attending West Point in 1886.  Douglas MacArthur, who was considerably younger, had entered the Army in 1903.

Captain John J. Pershing in 1902.  At this point he had already been in the Army for eighteen years.

Now, as we've already discussed, the size of the Army prior to World War One was tiny, so this only applies to a small number of the men who served in the service in the Great War (although we must also consider the Navy and the Marines in this as well.  But it is significant.

U.S. officers in Cuba during the Spanish American War, including Dr. Leonard Wood, in a combat command, second from right (Theodore Roosevelt far right).  Wood would later be the military governor of Cuba and was widely regarded as the logical commander for the AEF.  His association with Roosevelt certainly operated against that.  Wood had entered the Army as a contract surgeon in 1886, which was the norm for military surgeon's at the time, and had won the Medal of Honor for carrying dispatches 100 miles in the campaign against Geronimo.

If we look at the National Guard the situation gets much murkier.  There was no retirement for National Guardsmen at all until just prior to World War Two and, therefore, there was little reason to stay in the National Guard for thirty years, although many did.  And Guard units were much looser in adherence to age limits, so they not infrequently allowed enlistment of underage soldiers all the way up until just before World War Two. So that changes our consideration quite a bit, as the National Guard was a significant part of the Army during the war.

Hugh Scott, who was Army Chief of Staff at the start of World War One and who had to retire upon reaching age 64.  He was born in 1850 and had entered the Army in June 1876, meaning that he had actually entered the Army just before the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

So were draftees.  Conscription brought huge numbers of men into the service during the Great War, although only to the Army.  The other services did not draw conscripts.  The original conscription ages were from age 21 to 31. This was changed later to age 18 to 45.  Voluntary enlistment ages comported in expanding upwards.

Now, these points can be overdone.  Most men who joined the Army as enlisted men did not stay in it, serving a single enlistment.  They may have been older, on average, than men who enlisted after the enlistment age became 18, but just like those men now, they usually didn't make a career of it.  But at the same time, the Army was smaller then and the up or out system that exists now, did not exist then except, to a limited extent, for officers.

And most men who came into the U.S. Army, Navy and Marine Corps during World War One did so solely for the duration of the war. They had no intent to remain in the service at all.  And those who came in via the draft, and that was the large majority, were scaled towards the lower age, intentionally, rather than the higher age.  So most U.S. servicemen during World War One were undoubtedly in their twenties.

Still, that's significant. . . and not only for WWI but for later U.S. wars as well.  Contrary to widely held belief, the U.S. military isn't usually made up of "kids".  Teenage combatants have certainly existed, but they are not and never have been the rule.

For what its worth, the Army has in recent years nearly returned to the WWI, and WWII, upper age limits for enlistment and in some ways we see the age story of a century ago repeating.  The upper age limit for the Army is now 42, two years younger than what the Army asked for, which was age 44.  That's fairly amazing, but it shows that the average condition of people in their 40s is often better than it was in prior decades when chronic injuries took their toll.  Indeed, while we have pointed out that people really aren't living longer than they used to, as is so often claimed, they are often quite a bit healthier than they used to be due to medical advances and other factors.

Empirical SCOTUS: Retirement plan blues

Empirical SCOTUS: Retirement plan blues

Lex Anteinternet: Retirement

I ran this item back in March of 2014:

Lex Anteinternet: Retirement: If you are in business, or read business news, or listen to any type of commentary at all, you're going to hear a lot about retirem...

Something that I wasn't aware of then, and have only learned recently, is that the average American retirement age falls in between 58 years old and 62 years of age.  62 is when the generational cohort I'm in can first take Social Security, which explains part of that.

But not all of it.

Ill health, whether it be the natural or unnatural deterioration of the body, and mental factors, including the natural deterioration of the mind in some circumstances, or the cumulative impact of years of stress on others, or unemployment of older workers, all play a significant factor.  In this way, perhaps, we're closer to earlier generations in regards to the close out of our work years than we might suppose.

It's interesting, but perhaps natural, that we've come to associate "retirement age" with age 65, which for generations has been the age at which a person is fully eligible for Social Security.  Interestingly, that same age was adopted by the Canadian government for its full retirement.  65 is not the age for post Boomer retirees in these regards in the US any longer, however.  In my generational cohort its age 67.  In the UK it was age 65 for men and age 60 for women for eons, although that is going up.  65 is common in many European countries as well, as are differential ages for men and women, with women's uniformly being younger where the ages are not the same.  So, we have to assume that placing retirement in the 60s is for a real reason, as so many nations do it.  After all, if countries as divergent as Vietnam (60 men/55 women) and Ireland (66 men and women) take this approach, it must mean something.

It doesn't mean that a person will be in super health, or even capable of working, at that age, however.  Retirement sites like to show healthy couples in their 60s enjoying life in exciting ways, but many people by their late 50s are in pretty darned bad shape.

All of which may mean nothing at all, or which may be serious food for thought.

Lex Anteinternet: A legal Gerontocracy?

Like a vampire from a movie, the topic I wrote about last legislative session here, is back again:

Lex Anteinternet: A legal Gerontocracy?: There's a bill pending in Wyoming's legislature which proposes to remove the mandatory retirement age for the judiciary, whic...

All my original comments apply to this still bad idea.  Just like last year, the concept of changing the retirement age for judges from 70 years to 75 is still a bad idea.

When legislators backing this concept were interviewed by the Tribune this go around, one of them made the comment that "people are living longer", which is frequently the ill thought out excuse for such things.  People are not, of course, living longer, they aren't dying as young, which isn't quite the same thing.

While it is good that people aren't dying as young, what the impact of that has been, in undeniable part, is that a lot more people are living with dementia than they used to.  This is something that backers of this sort of thing have got to face.  And this isn't an abstraction to me.  My own mother, God bless her, is now well over 75, but she lives with this, and as an impact of that, so do I.  Dementia strikes different people, who are afflicted with it, at different ages, and a lot of people are afflicted with it. By pushing the envelope on the ages of judges, we're pretty much guaranteeing that some will be so impacted while on the bench. When that happens, what do we do, impeach them?  That's not a very dignified end of their service.

And, while I hesitate to say it, perhaps its time to note that at some point the Baby Boomer Generation has to loosen its grip on absolutely everything.  Prior generations did, allowing them to step up to the plate, but as a generation they are remarkably reluctant to.  Recent changes in Social Security eligibility, for example, have not impacted them.  Our current crop of Presidential candidates are all Boomer retreads, or seem to be, again.

This is not to take a shot at the generation, but it's notable that now that they are the generation principally occupying the bench, a Legislature which probably is principally made up of the same generation, now thinks it'd be a good idea to have judges in eyesight of 80 years old, thereby effectively keeping their own generation on the bench.  At some point, things have to go to the young, and even as it is right now that would mean that there'd be a lot of lawyers in this state in their 40s, which isn't exactly young, who'd never get  the chance to serve.

This is a terrible idea. At age 70, a person ought to be able to go on to something else in life.  If they still want to work, they can.  If they don't, they shouldn't have to. But if they're in a public office in the judiciary, by that age they're well outside of the generational cohort they're judging, and it's time to turn it over to somebody younger.

A legal Gerontocracy?

There's a bill pending in Wyoming's legislature which proposes to remove the mandatory retirement age for the judiciary, which is presently 70 years old.

The cited reason for this bill, which has passed at least one reading in the house, and which I guess will pass, is that the sponsoring legislators were distressed by a relatively recent retirement of a Wyoming Supreme Court justice, whom they regarded as a legal treasure.  Of course, that cited basis is somewhat insulting to the newly appointed justice, but apparently they aren't so worried about that.  They claim, at any rate, that Wyoming's mandatory age 70 retirement means that great legal minds are being deprived from continuing on in the judiciary because of an arbitrary retirement age.  Fans of such legislation also tend to note that people are living, and working, much longer than they used to.

They ought to rethink it.

All of the cited basis for the legislation may well be true.  But equally true are a hosts of physical and social reasons why this is a bad idea.

First of all, I'm not stating that people shouldn't work past age 70 if they want to. That's their own business, if they work in the private sector.  But in the public sector, and particularly in a position of great importance in which the worker was appointed by the Governor, it's another matter entirely.

Most people, even now in our modern age, do not escape the ravages of time. We all hope to, but very few of us really do.  The impacts of age and infirmity impact different occupations differently.  It's rare, for example to find a 40 year old rig hand, they're just too old, just as its rare to find a 40 year old professional football player. The body cannot handle it.  For mental occupations, however, 40 years old might be young.  A 40 year old Governor is extraordinary rare.  Barrack Obama, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were all regarded as young Presidents, where as they'd otherwise be regarded as middle aged men during those same time periods.  A 40 year old judge is not uncommon, but still fairly rare.  A judge appointed at age 40 will have been practicing law for about 15 years, not a particularly long legal career, and just five years past the point where most practicing lawyers regard a lawyer as proficient.  I've known quite a few lawyers who were still practicing law at age 70, or even 80.  So what's the problem?

Well, one of  the problems is, for a cerebral occupation, some people's minds will begin to go starting in their 50s, but it will not really set in until their 60s.  Quite a few people, so many that's its regarded as a massive public health crisis, begin to suffer from dementia in their 70s or 80s.  Generally, a high percentage of people who suffer from these conditions have a bare inkling when the problems commences, but they have no real idea that they've slipped into it.  It might not be so obvious to others recently.

Indeed, I've experienced that personally.  My mother has fronto temporal dementia.  She cannot live on her own, at age 86, and has not been able to for two years.  But she seemingly remained sharp enough up until about age 80.  Oh, there were signs, but not so much that I was willing to believe them.  Her decline, in the end, came on extremely rapidly and very traumatically.

Surely this is not a problem for an older judge, correct?  After all, it's been pointed out, there's a process to remove a sick or disabled judge.  Well, in order to invoke that process, the judge has to be noticeably sick or disabled, which is not like flipping a switch.

Indeed, I have a couple of lawyer friends, now in their 60s ,who have remarked to me on more than one occasion how their memories were just shot.  One is practicing, the other is not.  The one who is not was frank that he had to quit, as his memory just couldn't match the requirements of the work.  Prior to that he had given up adversarial proceedings, as his memory was no longer suited for it.  That's admirable, but even today I can only barely tell that this is his condition.  I can, but only barely.  I can also, with the lawyer that remains in practice, and has no intention of retiring.

Several years ago I tried a case against a lawyer that very clearly was suffering from some sort of mental decline in his advanced age.  He was in his 70s.  His clients must not have noticed it, and the Court certainly did nothing about it.  His representation of his clients was bizarre to some degree.  And many years ago I had a case against a lawyer who ultimately withdrew from representing his client, who actually was so infirm he fell asleep during a deposition.  In none of these cases did anyone step in to cause the lawyer to step down.  I don't think, by and large, that average people necessarily grasp that a lawyer's skills are declining, and I'm not sure that any of their colleagues are willing or able to do anything about it.

All of that, of course, is from private practice, which people have a right to keep doing. But in a public trust would things be much different?  I doubt it.  And if they were, it'd be at the point where things were so bad that the only thing we'd later remember about that judge is that he had to be removed for mental infirmity. 

And that's just the most obvious case.  Being a judge is actually a fairly grueling line of work, at least for trial judges.  I've tried cases in which the judges became severely ill, but because there was an ongoing trial, they kept on keeping on. They really had no choice.  For older judges, with a greater list of ailments, this would be an increased problem.  Time off the bench means that nobody is there, or in a trial setting, perhaps a court commissioner, a part time judge, is there.  However, Wyoming's voters recently declined to allow a constitutional amendment that would legalize the practice of allowing commissioners to sit on the bench if the judge remains in the county, so that's a limited option.

And, frankly, perhaps its just not in society's interest to have lawyers in their 70s and 80s sitting on the bench, or perhaps particularly on the  Wyoming Supreme Court.  Critics would note that this is already the practice on the Federal bench, but on the trial level, the Federal court's mostly rely on very set law, or on state law.  On the appellate level it can be argued that the examples we have may not really support keeping judges on until, basically, they die.

The law really belongs to the people in the end.  There's a great deal to be said about stability in the law, but sometimes that stability can be a negative stability.  Judges that come on to the court as a species of reformer, either conservative or liberal, end up remaining on the court as a bulwark against change.  At the U.S. Supreme Court level the practice has been to appoint ideological judges who are relatively young, with the idea of cementing the movement o the day in the courts.  It only partially works as the judges end up staying, in some instances, for 30 or 40 years.  That's good, and bad, but do we really want it at the local level?

The Wyoming Supreme Court is not the U.S. Supreme Court, and no great issues of the Federal Constitution will come in front of it.  A lot of important local issues will, however.  If the retirement age is removed, this will mean that the justices, who are often in their 50s, may be on the bench for 30 years.  That's a long time to have a potentially fixed set of ideas in control.

Indeed, on the score, the U.S. Army of World War Two provides an interesting example.  Going into World War Two the Army had a large number of elderly generals.  George Marshall, the senior general of the Army, determined, with the expansion of the Army in 1940, to forcibly retire almost all of them.  It's sometimes erroneously believed that he retired all over 50, he did not, but the impact of his actions had that practical result.  The Army, therefore, went into the war with young generals, some actually only in their 30s.  Why?  Not because the older ones were infirm, it's just that their thinking didn't evolve during an era of mechanized war.  It was fixed in an earlier era.  There's be no reason to expect judges would be any different.

 George S. Patton at age 59. He and MacArthur were unusual for US field commanders in that they were retained even though they were over 50 years of age in 1940.  Patton is believed to have suffered from some temperament problems, however due to head injuries sustained as a younger man, and what his condition would have been like in his 60s and 70s is open to question.

Indeed, keeping the Army example up and going forward, the Army of the 50s, 60s, and 70s reflected the fact that a lot of those World War Two officers did not go when they could have, and should have. The Army changed its retirement policy during the war to allow retirement after 20 years, but many hung on to the required retirement age of 60, and that reflected itself in our strategic thought for a long time.  It will be noted that in at least one war of the 1960s, we did not do so well.

 Major General James Gavin, a legendary airborne general, in his mid 30s.

Every time a position like this is opened up for somebody of advanced age, it's closed for somebody of a younger age. If judges are allowed to add another decade or so to their service, ti means that some who would have become judges will not.  It would not be possible for those judges to really make the career adjustment for a variety of reasons later.  Quite a few Wyoming judges in recent years have been in their 40s.  Given another decade of practice would the same individuals still opt for the bench?  A lot of Wyoming judges are appointed in their 50s.  Those individuals will not be opting for the bench in their 60s.

Indeed, while I like all the judges I know in their 60s, the argument can almost be made to adopt the Army's current policy and require the judges to retire in their 60s. Army jurist, like other soldiers, must retire at age 60s, well before Social Security eligibility.  That does insure that all of the up and coming jurists have a place.  I don't know that this same policy would be good for Wyoming, but I can see an argument for 65, or even 63.  Yes, it's young, and perhaps too young. But it also would mean that retiring jurists would make space for lot more younger judges, and there'd be more who were judges over time.  That seems like a good idea to me.

Finally, for those who are able and want to remain working, it allows, or perhaps forces, their talents to be applied elsewhere, which may be to everyone's benefit. Some retired judges have gone on to late interesting and valuable careers.  One became a famous baseball commissioner, for example.  One Wyoming district court judge in recent years went on to be a valuable appointed office under Governor Freudenthal.  There are other roles they can play.

Even with all of that, I suspect that this bill will pass.  People don't like to contemplate the grim realities of later life much, and like to pretend it won't occur.  And people really don't look out much for the younger age groups as a whole, even though people like to claim they do.  My prediction is that this bill will pass, and as a result, the judiciary will be lost to many fine individuals who would have made good judges, and we'll eventually have the embarrassing sceptical of somebody having to be removed for infirmity.

Epilog:

From the June 5, 2013, New York Times.

  ALBANY — At 74, Justice Sidney F. Strauss loves his job and has no desire to stop working. But at the end of 2014, he may be forced into his golden years by a mandatory retirement rule.

“Fifty years ago, when the life expectancy was 61, if you said, ‘You want to work to 76?’ They’d say, ‘You should live so long,’ ” said Justice Strauss, a State Supreme Court judge in Queens. “But as long as I am physically and mentally capable of doing this, I want to keep doing this.”

Each year, judges across New York and the rest of the country grudgingly hang up their robes because of these rules, many of which were inscribed in state constitutions well before the eras of penicillin, cholesterol drugs and hip replacements. More than 30 states and the District of Columbia have an age limit on jurists, according to the National Center for State Courts: 70 is the limit in many states; in Vermont, it is an optimistic 90.

In New York, judges have to retire at either 70 or 76, depending on their courts. But this year, a reprieve seems possible.

The Legislature has been considering a bill that would amend the State Constitution, if approved by voters, to extend the retirement age to 80 for hundreds of judges statewide, including the chief judge of the Court of Appeals, Jonathan Lippman.

Goodness.  Law belongs to the public, and a person loving their job has little to do with that.  Moves such as this effectively mean that people can live in some judicial districts had have the same judge presiding over it their entire lives. That hardly seems fair, or wise.  People may, due to improved healthcare, live to very advanced years, but does that mean that they should get to treat the office of judge as a personal possession for those long lives?

Epilog

Earlier this week I posted an item from the Federal Court list serve on the 70, that's right 70, Federal judges who are still serving on the Federal bench in some capacity who are veterans of World War Two.

I suppose differently, but that of course means that these gentlemen way up there in years.  I mentioned this to a couple of people, and received a couple of different reactions.  Frankly, having had to deal with the problems my mother's dementia creates for her, and therefore by extension us, has caused me to really, really doubt the wisdom of allowing somebody to work in this capacity for so long, and I wasn't the only one.  My mother thinks she's fine, and if she were a Federal judge, she'd probably be refusing to retire.  She certainly is in exceptional health for a person her age, except for mentally.

One reaction was a shocked "why would a person do that" which a teenager expressed to me.  "You could retire and do whatever you wanted."  Frankly, I feel that way too, although at age 51 I'm beginning to see how it becomes the case you can no longer do whatever you'd want. Still, I had that question myself.

A question of that type was one of the things the interviewer asked the various judges. Here's one of the answers?

Q. What makes you continue to serve on the bench?
A. I was appointed for life and I’m going to serve out my term. … it’s a performance of a duty, the same as I was doing when I was in Europe. I’m very big on duty, I was given a duty by President Nixon, and I have done my damnedest to carry it out for the 40 years I’ve been here.

Well, okay, but that perhaps demonstrates why these appointments probably ought to have a cap for retirement on them.  Nixon was a while back there.

Another jurist just enjoyed doing the job:

Q. You’ve kept up an active workload as a judge. For those who don’t have a lifetime appointment, what is that keeps you judging at this time of your life?
A. Well, I respect the court, and I’m interested in what I’m doing, what I have been doing over the years, so I’d like to continue doing as much of that as I’m physically capable of. Well, it’s partly just the satisfaction of doing this kind of work. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have stayed on as long as I did, because I could have retired or gone elsewhere many years ago. This is just what I like to do most.

I like that answer a lot better, quite frankly, although it still bothers me that a person can occupy a limited special occupation for so long.

 Judge Leo Glasser provided this reasoning:

Q. Why do you continue to work full-time on the bench?
A. Well, to begin with, I love the law. The United States District Court is without any doubt the greatest court in the world, in the sense that it deals with everything from admiralty to zoning – every conceivable aspect of the law. Also, if senior judges all decided to go fishing, I think the federal judiciary would be in a great deal of difficulty. I don’t remember the percentage of federal cases that senior judges deal with, but it’s substantial. We perform a significant service to the judiciary, and to the country by extension.

 Judge Arthur Spatt's view was similar, implicitly.

Q. Why do you continue to work as a judge?
I carry a full load, absolute full load, same as my regular colleagues. This is the most extraordinary judicial position. …  I have both civil and criminal cases. I have diversity cases, where a citizen of one state is suing a citizen of another state. Every kind of case, whether it is an automobile accident or an action on a promissory note or a contract. I am so fortunate to be able to have this judgeship. … It’s as stimulating  as  the first day I was in it. Every case presents new things, innovative things, interesting things, challenging things.

I can't say that any of this changes my view. Rather, in some ways it reenforces it.   The job doesn't really belong to an individual the way other jobs do, but rather to the country as a whole.  It does charge that person with a duty, but does that duty include occupying it until death?  I don't think so.  Perhaps a larger duty exists to allow it to be occupied by a younger generation at some point. And no matter how much a person might enjoy it, enjoying it wouldn't seem to be a justification for continuing to occupy it.

Retirement

If you are in business, or read business news, or listen to any type of commentary at all, you're going to hear a lot about retirement.  For that matter, if you live to be 50 years of age, and I certainly hope you do, if you are not already, you're going to at least think about retirement with the American Association of Retired Persons sends you mail, implicitly suggesting that by age 50 you've amassed so much wealth that you are going to retire. And the topic appear sin professional journals all the time. The most recent issue of the ABA journal, for example, has its cover story on the topic of retirement.

For a lot of Americans, indeed most Americans, that's a bit of a cruel joke.  Most folks can't retire at 50, and most never have been able to do so.  Beyond that, however, at about that age you'll start to notice an interesting dichotomy of stuff on retirement, some of which is really scary, and some of which is somewhat delusional.

In terms of delusional, I'm always slightly amazed by the series of materials that seek to make you feel guilty about retiring, of which there is a fair amount (and, no, I'm 50 and not anywhere near retiring).  This stuff suggests that when you are of retirement age, say your 60s, you probably ought to do one of two things:

1.  You ought to be starting a new job/retirement/business that reflects your long hidden dreams and talents, or which expresses that series of dreams, talents and values you've developed in your years of work; or

2.  You ought to be able to use your retirement to live a wild life of traveling abandon and adventure.

I know you've seen this stuff.  You are retired, according to the television advertisement, and now you somehow own Monument Valley. Wow.

Or you are retired and open a vineyard in Tuscany.  Jeepers. . . your work really worked out for you big time.

Or you now can open a company that competes with Microsoft. . . or manufactures jackets for kittens, or whatever.  These portrayals are so common that one brokerage company actually made fun of them, in a clever way, with a befuddled individual who needs advice stating something like "A vineyard?  Come on!,", which brings me to the second type of retirement portrayal, which is that if you are in the Middle Class, forget it, it won't be happening.  You're doomed.  Not to sound to glum, but that portrayal is probably much closer to the mark.

All of which makes looking at retirement in a historical context both worthwhile and interesting.  Maybe even productive.  I.e., how did we get here.  Something has been occurring in recent years, to be sure, and this topic is in the news a lot one way or the other, whether it simply be due to a local well known person retiring, or it be warning news about most people in the near future never being able to retire.

One thing we might note here, however, right off the bat is that the common canard about "people living longer" simply isn't true.  People do not live any longer presently than they ever have.  As we addressed in the post about life spans, the very widespread notion that "people live longer today" is based upon a misunderstanding of statistics.  People don't live longer, they simply do not die from some untimely event, whether that be disease, violence, or injury, as frequently as they once did.  Indeed, they do not die by some of these causes (violence, death at birth, etc) nearly as frequently as they once did by a huge margin.  That means more live out their allotted years, so to speak, than was once the case.  Put another way, not too many people would regard being falling off of a hay rake and getting dragged to death a natural way to go, but more than a few teenagers experienced that sort of death up until relatively recently.

But this fact does inspire the two reactions noted above.  On one hand, the combination of better medicine, much less physically arduous labor, increased surplus income and the exceptionalist expectations of the Baby Boom generations has lead to a sort of expectation that the old won't ever grow old, and that we should expect to be touring Naples on bicycles up until our 90s.  And for a few, that is darned near true.  My mother didn't tour Naples on a bike, but she did ride one around town up until just a few years ago, when old age finally really caught up with her.  On the other hand, the same increase in the number of people who grow old, combined with massive societal changes in the past century, inspire legitimate fears in many that their declining years will be impoverished and difficult.

Most people now are used to the idea of there at least being something called retirement.  And while that concept goes back surprisingly far, retirement as an actual practice for most people does not.  Indeed, for most people, and I mean for most people on Earth, it didn't become a possibility until the late 19th Century.

Prior to the late 19th Century retirement for average people just didn't exist.  Part of the reason why, particularly in North American, is that in the much more rural economies of years past, there wasn't an economic ability for it, and there was certainly no state sponsored retirement of any kind.  Farmers basically worked on the land until they passed away, with it being the rule that, if they owned their land (and most North American farmers did) they passed the farm on to one of their children.  If they grew too infirm to work it, that passing on feature effected their retirement, basically.  They'd still be there, even if they could no longer work as much, or indeed at all.

This practice, by the way, is still pretty common with agricultural families.

In other lines of work, the same could also be true, however.  In any sort of family operation, the older male would generally keep working at it as long as he could and if there was somebody to pass it on to, he did.

 Blacksmith, and not a young one.

Where this opportunity didn't present itself, men and women with families, and that was most men and women, might eventually move in with one of their children for their retired years.  So, an old lawyer, like John Adams (also a farmer), or Clarence Darrow, might work up until his death, and many did.  But some might also pass beyond the ability to practice and retire, moving in with a family member and closing their practice.

Of course, some people became wealthy, but in the pre late 19th Century era, that didn't equate with retiring as a rule.  For some it did, of course, but that tended to mean that they had lives of varying degrees of abundance or leisure, depending upon the amount of wealth.  That doesn't vary much from now, expect that a much, much, smaller percentage of the population achieved wealth prior to World War Two.  There are, of course, exceptions.

So, with that being the case, how did modern retirement come about? Well, two ways.  War and Social Revolution.

That's a slight exaggeration, but only slight.

The first real retirements we can find, in the modern sense, start off with various armies.  How armies were raised and manned varied over the world in the 18th and 19th Century, but it's about that time that retirement systems for soldiers started to come into play.  Originally, there was none. Indeed, as shocking as it may now seem, in many European armies of the 18th Century soldiers were conscripted for life or near life terms, if they were conscripted.  Short term conscription for most European armies (the Russians excepted, Russians solders were conscripted for a term of 25 years) came in during the 19th Century, and for solid military reasons.  In the 18th Century, however, even British soldiers, who were volunteers, joined for life.

American soldiers, few in number until World War Two, never joined for life and always joined for a short term, but in both instances, there was no such thing as retirement.  If a soldier was retired, it was because he became too infirm or injured to keep on soldiering.  Every country recognized a a system for retiring soldiers in that situation, but only that one. So, showing that things can reverse direction, the lot of an 18th Century soldier was worse in this fashion than it was for a Roman soldier.  Roman soldiers actually could retire, with a grant of land.

The impact of this, however, was to put a lot of old enlisted men into service.  You can find plenty of pre Civil War American photographs of U.S. soldiers, for example, who are ancient.  They didn't get paid well enough to retire on savings, they didn't always have families, so they had to keep on working. There was no age cap on service, and they ultimately mustered out by infirmity or death.

That was a bad thing not only for the soldiers, but the armies as well.  To take the American example, getting 20 year olds (and the Army generally would not enlist teenagers up until the 20th Century) to spend the month of November in the snow, in Wyoming, eating moldy bacon is one thing.  Getting 60 year olds to do that, and to keep functioning, is quite another.  Now, a lot of 19th Century 60 year olds were perfectly capable of doing that, and even more are now, but in a profession in which, if you were a career man you were at it for decades, you had been badly injured and seriously ill at some point by that time, making it all the tougher.  Indeed, according to one statistical analysis I've seen, the majority of American men over 40 years of age lived with some chronic condition by age 40.  Probably the majority now do as well, but at that time, you just endured it. And enduring it wears you down.

The Army, indeed all armies, recognized this and they all began to introduce retirement systems.  In the U.S. the Army first allowed officers to retire after 40 years of service after the Civil War.  Soon thereafter, this policy was expanded to include enlisted men. Other countries adopted similar policies.

The Last Muster.  Pen and ink depiction of British Army pensioners, in uniform.

This served two purposes.  One is it simply recognized decades of service.  But it also recognized that younger men made better soldiers for a variety of reasons.  One was, of course, physical.  The original retirement system, which effectively retired U.S. soldiers at about 60 years of age, recognized that by that time they probably were physically pushing the limits of their service abilities.

World War One poster noting the physical abilities of generations of soldiers.

Indeed, this was so much the case that Theodore Roosevelt encourage the early retirement of officers who were no longer physically fit, during his presidency, by requiring officers to go on long rides (ninety miles)on their mounts.  All officers were expected to know how to ride in that era, and he tested them on it.  By that time, many older ones couldn't endure it, and accordingly they were retired.  Even officers in the Navy were given the choice of going on a very horseback ride, a very long bicycle ride, or a very long hike.

The other purpose was an intellectual one, however.  By the late 19th Century the military sciences were advancing rapidly, and the Army began to recognize that keeping old officers in place impaired the ability to adapt.  The American army was legendary for keeping men in their same ranks for eons, and by the early 20th Century, this was recognized to be a bad idea.  Sixty year old captains who had the same command for fifteen years were much less likely to appreciate newly introduced weapons than, for example, a captain in his twenties might be.  The Army accordingly dropped the retirement age to 30 years, effectively encouraging, but not requiring, men to retire early, at 3/4s pay, in their 50s.  

Even this proved to be problematic at the start of World War Two, and the Army, recognizing a need to adapt to a change in the nature of war, dropped the retirement age to twenty years.  This, it must be noted, was an early retirement age. To obtain full retirement a soldier had to stay in for 40 years, as they still do. But they could take half pay and retire at 20 years.  Less attractive at first to enlisted men as opposed to officers, this provided a means to encourage retirement for officers whom the service wanted out of the way, which they soon found other ways to additionally encourage.

 While the U.S. armed forces did indeed encourage a lot of older soldiers to "move on" at the start of World War Two, combat attrition in World War One had been so high in the Commonwealth nations that this poster actually was aimed at drawing back in World War One soldiers, noting that many in their 40s and 50s still had plenty of vigor for later service.  Unlike the U.S. Army, the British used a fair number of older officers during the war, as did the Germans.

This created the modern service retirement system we still have in place. The system spread out of the Armed forces and into nearly every type of uniformed service we have today.  Policemen, for example, generally can retire early at 20 years of service.  It's even spread out of uniformed service in some instances, however, and some other sorts of government workers have retirement systems of this type.

Retirement in other fields is a somewhat more recent phenomenon.  It's a product of the industrial revolution really.  Industrial employment, like military service, chewed men up.  It also organized them.  And this organization both created opportunities, and threats, depending upon how they were handled.  And it also removed men from the rural support system in which they'd previously lived.  If a blacksmith was injured in his small town occupation, chances are that his sons, or brothers, could take over for him, and if he had to stay home, no doubt in poverty, at least there was a home to go to.  When he grew old and could no longer work, the same was true, and chances were high that there was a fireside to stay near, as the younger men went out to work.

Once industrial labor arose, this was no longer true.  Early industrial laborers were displaced from farms and small towns to a very large extent.  As a result, they were disoriented, rootless, and in some ways at the mercy of their environment.  Ultimately, they came to agitate for protection, cognizant of the dangers of their work and what that meant for them personally.

This created a wide variety of responses, but one of them ultimately came to be socially sponsored retirement.  Men could not work in heavy industry indefinitely, but they could not leave those occupations and be able to depend on anything to fall back on. Something had to replace the family supported home to retire to, and that came to be retirement, either government sponsored or employer funded, both of which served to keep the social wolf from the door.

Early moves towards wider retirement started in the early 20th Century, with the first proposal for a Social Security being advanced in the Progressive Party campaign of Theodore Roosevelt.  Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign failed, but the Great Depression gave new force to the argument and Social Security, a fairly radical proposal by historical standards, came to be reality under Franklin Roosevelt.  By that time, heavy industry had privately incorporated it in many instances. World War Two, which boosted the advantages to private industry to supply benefits during a period in which wages were frozen, boosted it further.

 

Female industrial laborer, World War Two. Labor had been agitating for benefits beyond increased wages since the late 19th Century, but it was World War Two that really changed the nature of health care and retirement in the United States.

This gave us the situation we had in the middle of the 20th Century, and which lasted until at least the 1970s. By and large, in private employment in the US, most occupations offered pensions of some sort.  This promised workers the ability to retire at age 65.  In addition to that, Social Security became available at age 63, with full benefits payable at age 65.  For those with service occupations, retirement came to be available after 30 or 20 years.  Frequently, those who had service employments went on to a second career, in light of the fact that they were retiring fairly young.

So far so good, but staring in the late 1980s, something began to break down in this system. Now, while that system hasn't completely broken, concern over the system is widespread.  What happened?

Well, for one thing work stability declined in the private sector, while seemingly becoming solidifying in the government sector, at least up until very recently.  For long time government employees, I'd note, many are having their last laugh now after years of deridment by those in the private sector.  I've heard this more than once, for example, from government lawyers who are nearing retirement and now see that their private sector fellows, who often chided them for sticking it out in "low paying" (which were really lower paying, not low paying) positions for decades.  Now the government sector lawyers are able to retire, while  many of those in higher paying private practices cannot.  Indeed, one comment of that type just appeared on an ABA website about retirement.

In the private sector manufacturing jobs became highly unstable, if they didn't disappear completely, and this spilled over into white collar occupations as well.  Much has been made of the fact that employees can't enter an occupation  and plan on sticking it out for their career for one reason or another.  One of the things little noted about that is that with that instability, has come the evaporation of retirement plans.  Retirement plans only make sense for long term employees, not short term ones. 

So, is this system broken?  Put another way, is it unrealistic?

That's hard to answer, but retirement is rapidly becoming something that is not nearly as certain for many people as it once was.  Social Security wasn't designed to provide a fancy retirement, just to keep people from falling into retired poverty, and it wasn't meant to cover 100% of the people who paid into it either.  Indeed, it still doesn't cover 100%, but in an era when medicine has made early deaths less common, more people now live into their old age and advanced old age.

But another aspect of this may simply be that expectations about retirements became unrealistic.  Truth be known, much of our concept of retirement is retirement as envisioned by the World War Two and Boomer generations, which was never the historical norm.  The abnormal economies of the 1940s through 1960s lead people, gradually, to an expectation of sort of a luxurious retirement, replete with a new home far away from where they'd worked.  Historically, however, in the 60 or so years prior to that, retirement just meant retirement in place and in scale.  People tended to live decades in one house which they'd paid off well before they retired.   When they retired, they stayed home, not traveled the globe and not dreaming of planting vineyards in Tuscany.

But in order to do that, a person has to have paid their debt down to next to nothing, or nothing, but the time they're in the 60s at least, if not their mid 50s.  Otherwise, they're going to have to have a pretty significant income in retirement.  That is unrealistic.

So, what does all of this mean?  Hopefully it doesn't mean that retirement has returned to its absolute historical norm, i.e., non existent.  But it does mean that the golden age of retirement is most likely over, at least for the foreseeable future, and in the type of economy we have now.  Social Security is already being readjusted to creep it back to its more historical demographic status, and ages of entitlement have started to go up.  I strongly suspect that will start occurring in government retirements as well, which are now strained.  Twenty year plans, where they exist, will disappear in favor of thirty year plans that only allow a draw once the recipient hits age sixty, much like Army Reserve retirements now work.  That'll probably continue as well.  For those retiring in the future, a paid off home with a garden in the backyard is probably a lot more likely than trips to France and vineyards in Tuscany.

Postscript

The New York Times has an article on retirees today noting that those who want to keep on working often have a hard time finding a job that suits them, and that those who have retired find they often like it better than they suppose.

I'm glad to read that really.  While its contrarian in nature, in our society, I find the general view that its great if people past retirement age can keep working, and that they really should. Should they, if they can retire?  I'm not so sure.  It's discouraging to think that the value of a person is measured only in their ability to work, and that for everyone it must be the case that all their adult years must be employed.  That says something about us, I think, as a society.

While it's also contrarian of me to mention it, this sort of taps into the theme of one of the Super Bowl advertisements from this year, in which an actor Neal McDonough discusses how in the US we get two weeks off per year for vacation (which is inaccurate for most Americans, most don't take all their vacation so they take less than that) while the French take August (which is also inaccurate, as the French also tend to extent their vacations with a general strike from time to time).  We're informed we're a can do sort of people, and at the end its suggested that our reward for that is a Cadillac.

Well, I have nothing against Cadillacs, but that advertisement sort of makes you wonder if you should go for a Peugeot instead and take August off.

History of Enlisted retirmement

The U.S. Army's FM 7-22.7 provides:

Enlisted Retirement

In 1885 Congress authorized voluntary retirement for enlisted soldiers. The system allowed a soldier to retire after 30 years of service with threequarters of his active duty pay and allowances. This remained relatively unchanged until 1945 when enlisted personnel could retire after 20 years of service with half pay. In 1948 Congress authorized retirement for career members of the Reserve and National Guard. Military retirement pay is not a pension, but rather is delayed compensation for completing 20 or more years of active military service. It not only provides an incentive for soldiers to complete 20 years of service, but also creates a backup pool of experienced personnel in the event of a national emergency.

I wonder if this is correct?  I thought the 30 year retirement system pre dated 1885, and the 20 year one came in at the start of World War Two.