When on August I4, I935, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act,' he approved the inauguration of a program of old-age insurance which will include within its coverage more than twenty-five million people. Embodied in Titles II and VIII of the Act, this program constitutes the largest single system of social insurance in the world. Under Title II, the Act provides for the establishment by the federal government of an old-age reserve account and for the payment of old-age and death benefits. Title VIII provides for a system of income and excise taxes to be levied on a large proportion of the employees and employers of the country. Although there is no direct connection between these two titles, the benefits paid under Title II of the Act are to be computed on the same wages received in the same employments upon which the taxes under Title VIII of the Act are levied.2 The affixing of the President's signature terminated a year of intensive planning and discussion of this program of old-age insurance. In this short period of time, the results of experience with old-age security programs both at home and abroad were restudied, and evaluated. The special characteristics of American economic and social life and of the American legal system were analyzed in their relation to improved techniques of meeting the problem of mounting old-age dependency. The outcome of these studies and discussions was the adoption of a technique in public welfare administration new to this country. The enactment of the old-age insurance provisions of the Social Security Act is, however, but the first step in a long process of evolution. A social insurance program of such immense size and widespread influence will require a generation or more of adjustment in meeting the actuarial, administrative, financial and social problems which experience is bound to raise. Regardless of the care exercised in planning a * A.B., 1920, A.M., I92I, Ph.D., 1928, Princeton University. Professor of Economics and Director of the Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University. Staff Consultant, Committee on Economic Security, I934-35; Member, President's Emergency Committee for Employment, i930-31; Member, Advisory Committee on Employment to Federal Co6rdinator of Transportation, 1933-35; Consultant, New Jersey Social Security Commission, I935-36. Co-author, The Labor Banking Movement in the United States (1929); Facing the Facts, an Economic Diagnosis (1932). 1 Public, No. 27I, 74th Cong., ist Sess., 49 STAT. 620. 2Compare ?210 (a) with ?8i (a) and ?2I0 (b) with ?8 I (b).