This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

It’s a phenomenon right across the developed world – people carrying on working beyond the usual retirement age. Here in the UK, 11.5 per cent of people over 65 are in work, a proportion that has doubled since 2000. That’s 1.43 million people. But that is still low compared to some other countries. In the US it’s nearly 20 per cent of over 65s still working. In Japan, a country with the highest proportion of elderly people in the world, it is some 25 per cent. That is 9.1 million still working, a number that has been rising for more than 20 years.

It looks inevitable that we will continue along the same path, with more and more of us either carrying on working beyond retirement age, which in any case is going up, or going back into jobs after we have formally retired. How should we do this well – or at least put ourselves into a position where, if we do have to go back into work, we are able to find a satisfying way of doing so?

We are all different in our skills, temperament, family circumstances. We are different, too, in the reasons why we might want to carry on working. For some it is money. Many people through bad planning or bad luck find they cannot manage on the income they have or hoped to have in retirement. Governments change their policies on taxes, pensions and the retirement age. Private pensions may fall short of........

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