We're living in an "age of anti-ambition" says Elle Hunt. And Stefan Stern says increasing numbers of over-50s are taking early retirement. As one of that happy band, let me suggest why.

It's because with a modest effort, you can live well on around an average income, having days out, city breaks and good holidays. And - which is insufficiently remarked - such an income gives you access to the greatest books, films and music (unless you want to go to the opera or god help you, an Adele gig.)

Beyond a certain point therefore - attainable by most middle-class 50-somethings - the acquisition of wealth becomes futile. There's not much point buying a big house because you can only sleep in one bed at a time. Fancy cars will just get caught in traffic jams or by speed cameras. Expensive restaurants often serve bad food to the world's worst people. And cruises are, a friend tells me, the Daily Mail at sea. His point generalizes. Expensive pastimes such as golf, horse-riding or yachting are all excellent ways of meeting people I would pay good money to avoid*.

One look at the mega-rich shows the futility of great wealth. Jeff Bezos, for example, goes on amusement park rides alone and makes brief trips into near-space, thereby only emulating a mid-ranking Soviet Union Air Force officer of 61 years ago. That's a pathetic return on billions of pounds.

Scientific research corroborates all this. Whilst there is some albeit mixed evidence that money does buy happiness, it does not buy much. That's why things like a good social life have such high monetary equivalence in terms of their impact on well-being: they, more than money, make for a good life. Which is nasty, because the hours spent accumulating money can prevent you developing a fulfilling social life.

As Porter Wagoner
sang

Money can't buy back your youth when you're old
Or a friend when you're lonely, or a love that's grown cold
The wealthiest person is a pauper at times
Compared to the man with a satisfied mind

He was echoing some other great thinkers. Wealth and prestige said Adam Smith "are mere trinkets of frivolous utility":

Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body...They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death.

In 1930 Keynes looked forward to the economic problem - that of securing subsistence - being solved, a stage which some of us have achieved. When this has happened, he wrote:

It it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.

From this perspective, the question is not why people like me are stopping working or downshifting, but why more well-paid people do not do so.

One answer is that they've made imprudent life-choices. Ex-wives, private education for one's children, drink and gambling habits, yachts, fast cars and a desire to live in London all keep the City supplied with senior staff.

So too does something else. Many successful people don't regard work as something to be escaped at all, but as a means of fulfilment. Warren Buffett and even Elon Musk think what they are doing is fun. Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones have kept working into their 70s and 80s, but their contemporaries who became accountants have mostly stopped.

This might help explain why the UK has relatively few unicorn businesses. At some point in a company's history, running it stops being a fun job of solving engineering and coding puzzles and becomes instead grunt bureaucracy. Why not then sell up to some bureaucrats and live off a few million? There are several reasons: ego gratification; power; prestige; a sense of being a success; or a desire to beat your peers or father. A desire for what money buys, however, is, I suspect, low on the list.

For those of us without these other motives the one great thing that wealth buys is not so much goods and services as freedom - the ability to step out of the rat race.

If they've read this far, younger readers will be screaming their heads off: "all this is the solipsism of a privileged boomer."

Which it is of course. They don't have my luck in being able to retire early, simply because the unaffordability of housing means that cash that would otherwise go into pension savings is diverted towards mortgage or rent payments or paying off student loans. High energy prices, of course, have the same effect. Rather than save for retirement, as I could in my 30s, today's young people must support rentiers.

Their righteous discontent, however, demonstrates my point. They take little comfort in consumer goods such as smartphones and flat screen TVs because these are indeed trinkets of frivolous utility. What really matters to them is the freedom that would come from being able to live cheaply - a freedom that has been stolen from them.

Capitalism today does a good job of supplying youngsters with new affordable gadgets. But it does not give them the greater goods of real freedom and autonomy.

You might think this is a feature, not a bug. Even if most individuals - beyond a point - don't need to accumulate material goods, capitalism as a system does: accumulation is its very nature. This isn't a contradiction. For one thing, even if only a minority of rich people do want to become even richer, it is this minority that gets to run companies. And for another, capitalism is an emergent process which constrains even of the privileged and in which outcomes are independent of individuals' wishes. As Marx said:

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society...But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.

You might also think that a system that requires the accumulation of profit also requires a big supply of workers. From this point of view, debt bondage is a good thing: it forces people into employment thus enlarging the pool of pliant labour-power. Elementary economics says that if skilled older people drop out of work the economy loses human capital and hence potential output and (more importantly) profits.

In this sense, Keynes was naïve in thinking that the problem of adjusting to an affluence that makes leisure possible was merely a psychological one - a naivete that arose from his lack of a class analysis. The problem is also that capitalism cannot cope with a society of frugal leisure-seekers.

Or can it? Perhaps this view is too harsh on capitalism. Older people can be one of what Joel Mokyr calls the "forces of conservatism". They can be cantankerous, hard to manage, resistant to change, and uncomfortable with new technology; to this extent ageism in the workplace has a rational basis. Letting them go might therefore pave the way for productivity improvements and innovation.

Few people claim that the post-mid-2000s productivity slowdown was due to a loss of talented people, nor that the post-1945 productivity surge was caused by an influx thereof. And nor should they. The biggest determinants of productivity are institutions: organizational capital, state capacity, well-functioning markets and so on. Capitalism can survive seeing its more privileged subjects drop out or downshift. Whether it can survive increasingly dysfunctional institutions is another matter.

* In fact, if you come from a poor background and are in a well-paid job the mere act of going into the office will surround you with people you don't feel comfortable with. This, I suspect, is an under-appreciated cost of social mobility.