By Robert Skidelsky in The Guardian, July 2, 2012
The concept of retirement defines life by work – but we should be seeking a better balance for all ages
Retirement is not as old as you think. According to the Bible, God expelled Adam from Paradise with the terrible words: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." And that's more or less how it was until about a hundred years ago. Most people worked till they died. Pensions in the UK date from 1908, and the cost of the first pension schemes was tiny, as the retirement age of 70 was 20 years beyond average life expectancy. Retirement was for heaven – if one had lived a virtuous life.
Work has remained central to our existence, despite the lengthening gap between work and death we call retirement. We are expected to work till our sixties and somehow make the best of the dead years to follow. This is a problem for both finance and occupation. Lord Wei wants to fill up retirement with "work, leisure, and service". His National Retirement Service, proposed in a report published yesterday, would help retirees to "embrace a concept of retirement that is more active, economically and socially … saving taxpayers money and generating health and wealth for all generations".
In my view this is to get it the wrong way round. We shouldn't be aiming to extend the domain of work into old age, but to extend the domain of non-work into young age – that is, to abolish the concept of retirement altogether. A rich society no longer has the need to work its labour force into the grave. It already has "enough".
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