Why People Should Be Paid

Currently, in many countries, the age at which people stop paid work tends to be between 55 and 65. In the past, with few people living beyond the age of 80, it was rare for anybody to enjoy more than 20 years of retirement. Flow ever nowadays, that figure is much more likely to be 30, or even 40 years. This is often cited as a reason for requiring people to work to a later age.

Advocates of this point of view claim that it is extremely expensive to support people for so long in retirement. Pensions are paid for partly by people in their working lives, but today pension schemes usually yield far less money than necessary because they were designed to maintain people for much shorter periods. Increasingly, it is argued, the burden falls on