¹ Wilson, Thomas, ed., Pensions, Inflation, and Growth: A Comparative Study of the Elderly in the Welfare State (London, 1974) for warnings about the difficulty of standardizing these measures internationally.Google Scholar

² Kay, John A. and King, Mervyn A., The British Tax System (Oxford, 1978), pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

³ Though there is a sizable business in individual old-age savings policies too, boosted in Britain by a highly efficient and basically unregulated insurance industry (with costs significantly less than U.S. firms) and very favorable tax breaks (only partially weakened by tax changes of 1916 and 1984).Google Scholar

⁴ There were a number of private sector pension plans with statutory backing in the eighteenth century, but the first purely private sector plan identified was for lock-keepers on the River Lee Navigation in 1821, see Minutes of the Committee of Trustees of the Lee, River, 18 January 1821, in Public Record Office RAIL 845/9 [henceforth P.R.O. RAIL]. I am grateful to John H. Boyes for this reference.Google Scholar

⁵ Trades Union Congress, Annual Report, 1888.Google Scholar

⁶ Supple, Barry, The Royal Exchange Assurance: A History of British Insurance 1720–1970 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 221–22. The figures in the text include only “ordinary,” not “industrial” business.Google Scholar

⁷ The legal position under the Truck Acts or the 1902 Shop Clubs Act was unclear, but many lawyers advised against enforcing membership of pension funds on manual workers for fear of falling foul of these acts. Even for nonmanual employees, pension plans were usually mandatory only for new entrants, not for existing employees.Google Scholar

⁸ Memorandum of meeting of 12 December 1894 in P.R.O. RAIL 258/207, part 1.Google Scholar

⁹ For example, the benefit often included only the return of employee contributions on withdrawal, so that the employers' contributions were lost by leavers.

¹⁰ Hill, Octavia, evidence to Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, q. 10464, as quoted in Paul Johnson, “Old Age Pensions and Personal Savings in Great Britain, 1906–1937,” unpublished manuscript, p. 4.Google Scholar

¹¹ Nor were they obviously intended to be. To mimic private choice, the percentage of salary should have risen with salary; in fact it usually did not. There was also a good deal of debate in the early years about, for example, whether unmarried men should be obliged to subscribe to widows' benefits which did not apparently have any current value to them.Google Scholar

¹² Ministry of Labour Gazette (May 1938), pp. 172–74.Google Scholar

¹³ For example, Achenbaum, W.Andrew, Old Age in the New Land (Baltimore and London, 1978);Google ScholarHaber, Carole, Beyond Sixty-five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

¹⁴ For a fuller discussion, see my forthcoming Investing Retirement (Cambridge, England, 1986).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Commission on Superannuation in the Service, Civil, Minutes of Evidence, Cmd. 1745, 1903, q. 1604.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Report of the Departmental Committee on Railway Superannuation Funds, Cmd. 5349, 1910.Google Scholar See also Lazear, Edward P., “Why is There Mandatory Retirement?” Journal of Political Economy, 87 (12 1979), pp. 1261–84.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In Britain, deferred annuity contracts were relatively unpopular before 1956 because of tax discrimination against annuities and in favor of lump sum payments in insurance (though from 1921 there was the reverse discrimination in employer-run tax-exempt pension plans in favor of annuities).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Dublin, Louis I., A Family of Thirty Million: The Story of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (New York, 1943), pp. 181–83;Google ScholarStatist: Insurance Section, 14 July 1928, p. iii.Google Scholar On the earlier history of group insurance in the United States, see Buley, R. Carlyle, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, 1859–1964 (New York, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 770–800, 881–915.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Johnston, J. and Murphy, G. W., “The Growth of Life Assurance in the United Kingdom since 1880,” Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1956/1957).Google Scholar

²⁰ Broadly, in Britain, employee and employer contributions and the income of pension funds since 1921 have been free of all taxes, while pensions paid have been taxed at lower (“earned income”) rates and it has been possible to take a substantial portion of the pension as a (tax-free) lump sum. This has only been a major stimulus to pension fund growth since 1940 when income tax became a significant and widely-levied tax.Google Scholar

²¹ Government Actuary, Occupational Pension Schemes, 1979 (London, 1981).Google Scholar