The poster child of this story on CNN.com today is Jack Borden, a 101-year-old attorney who practices fulltime in Weatherford, Texas. Retirement is the last thing on his mind. “I have to use a walker because of old age, so there's not much else I could do except sit in my house. Why do that when I can not only enjoy life, but help some people?" In Borden’s view, as in Bill and Ruth Stein’s,  limited mobility is a catalyst for staying on the job rather than a reason to take a load off.

Yay for the Center for Retirement Research, which is doing its part to rectify the dearth of research on workers age 65 and up.  Dubbing their subjects “the elderly,” a paper by economists Steven Haider and David Loughran titled “Elderly Labor Supply: Work or Play?” looks at who in this group works, at what, and why they stop. Here are some of their findings, some predictable and some considerably less so:

A few weeks ago Alison Linn interviewed me for an article called “When the golden years include a commute,” part of an MSNBC series called “Plan C: The new reality of retirement.” The story, which quotes AARP editor Jim Toedtman at length, describes a workforce that’s retiring later and contains many people in their 70s, 80s and beyond.

Recently, perhaps in guilty compensation for a vacation of utter sloth, I’ve been mulling over the notion of productivity. Bound up in the American veneration of the work ethic, it’s prime redress for that overarching fear in old age:  becoming a burden. In my interview criteria I define it as “doing or making something on a regular schedule,” laying bare my assumption that most people (or at least most of my readers) aspire to lifelong productivity and that this is a good thing.  

The Knight Seminar ended almost a week ago, but I’m just beginning to digest all the information that came at me from experts in fields ranging from demography to neuroscience to end-of-life care. Here are eight quotes that struck me as particularly relevant to this project:

1. “We have gained on average 10 biological years of life since our grandparents’ era.” — Abigail Trafford, Washington Post health editor

Looking forward to cashing that Social Security check? For many of the people I’ve interviewed it’s a primary source of income. In 1935, just as they were beginning to enter the labor force, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law as part of the New Deal. Although this universal retirement program had precedents in Europe and in a system of Civil war pensions, it generated plenty of controversy — and continues to.