The bottom line is that people's retirement decisions aren't always entirely voluntary. In the current debate over the retirement age, that's worth remembering. Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the age at which Social Security retirement benefits can first be claimed from 62 to 64 would ultimately increase the size of the labor force and the economy by a bit more than 1 percent. That sounds pretty attractive.
But many people claimed early retirement benefits in 2009 and 2010 out of desperation. Even under more normal conditions, some of the people who want to work longer won't be able to. That's why Peter Diamond, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I have proposed ways of insulating Social Security's finances from the effects of rising life expectancy without increasing the age at which workers first become eligible for benefits.
Peter Orszag is vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup Inc. and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration. The opinions expressed are his own.