Cite as: 521 U. S. 121 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
There is moreover an even more fundamental objection to Metropolitan's proposed options. They implicitly reject the very conclusion required to make sense of the combined provisions limiting claims and mandating consideration of future effects: that a disability whose substantial effects are only potential is nonetheless a present disability, albeit a presently nominal one. It is, indeed, this realization that points toward a way to employ the wait-and-see approach to provide for the future effects of disability when capacity does not immediately decline. It is simply "reasonable" and "in the interest of justice" (to use the language of § 8(h)) to reflect merely nominal current disability with a correspondingly nominal award. Ordering nominal compensation holds open the possibility of a modified award if a future conjunction of injury, training, and employment opportunity should later depress the worker's ability to earn wages below the preinjury level, turning the potential disability into an actual one. It allows full scope to the mandate to consider the future effects of disability, it promotes accuracy, it preserves administrative simplicity by obviating cumbersome enquiries relating to the entire range of possible future states of affairs,8 and it avoids imputing to Congress the unlikely intent
"[Section 8(h)] provides for consideration of the effects of an injury . . . upon the employee's future ability to earn. . . . Often an employee returns to work earning for the time being the same wages as he earned prior to injury, although still in a disabled condition and with his opportunity to secure gainful employment definitely limited. . . . It is clear that in such a case the employee's ability to compete in the labor market has been definitely affected; and, though at present the employee is paid his former full-time earnings, he suffers permanent partial disability which should be compensable under the . . . Act . . . .
"In a case such as that . . . , an unscrupulous employer might with profit to himself continue the original wages . . . until the . . . right of review of the case (sec. 22) had run, . . . thus defeat[ing] the beneficent provisions of the . . . Act." H. R. Rep. No. 1945, 75th Cong., 3d Sess., 5-6 (1938); S. Rep. No. 1988, 75th Cong., 3d Sess., 1 (1938).
8 See Walters v. Metropolitan Ed. Enterprises, Inc., 519 U. S. 202, 208, 210-211 (1997) (weighing administrative simplicity in favor of permissible construction of statute).
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