28
Opinion of the Court
could be disputed by their son, might have wished to preclude all argument by specifying and categorically prohibiting the one activity—hosting a party—that was most likely to cause damage and most likely to occur.
The Third Circuit suggested that interpreting the statute as does the SSA would lead to "absurd results." Ibid. See also Kolman v. Sullivan, 925 F. 2d 212, 213 (CA7 1991) (the fact that a claimant could perform a past job that no longer exists would not be "a rational ground for denying benefits"). The court could conceive of "no plausible reason why Congress might have wanted to deny benefits to an otherwise qualified person simply because that person, although unable to perform any job that actually exists in the national economy, could perform a previous job that no longer exists." 294 F. 3d, at 572-573. But on the very next page the Third Circuit conceived of just such a plausible reason, namely, that "in the vast majority of cases, a claimant who is found to have the capacity to perform her past work also will have the capacity to perform other types of work." Id., at 574, n. 5. The conclusion which follows is that Congress could have determined that an analysis of a claimant's physical and mental capacity to do his previous work would "in the vast majority of cases" serve as an effective and efficient administrative proxy for the claimant's ability to do some work that does exist in the national economy. Such a proxy is useful because the step-five inquiry into whether the claimant's cumulative impairments preclude him from finding "other" work is very difficult, requiring consideration of "each of th[e] [vocational] factors and . . . an individual assessment of each claimant's abilities and limitations," Heckler v. Campbell, 461 U. S. 458, 460-461, n. 1 (1983) (citing 20 CFR §§ 404.1545-404.1565 (1982)). There is good reason to use a workable proxy that avoids the more expansive and individualized step-five analysis. As we have observed, "[t]he Social Security hearing system is 'probably the largest adjudicative
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