"Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go" cheerfully sing Snow White's diminutive friends as they head out for a day of toil. And they're 71 years old. So why do so many of us less vertically disadvantaged worry about the talk of extending by a few years beyond age 62 or 65 or 67 the date on which we can more or less afford to say goodbye to work?

Well, for some it is the sheer drudgery of their work. I am reminded of an old Red Skelton sketch in which he works in a Post Office, repetitively hand-cancelling stamps. Always with his eye on the clock. And when it hits 5 P.M., if he is in mid-downward stroke with his cancellation stamp, he returns it to the rack rather than complete the task.

Most jobs are not that tedious. But some are. And those who hold them have every right to watch the calendar with the same intense attention that Skelton watched the clock. So, too, with the remaining jobs that involve back-breaking or dangerous work, the sort that made men--almost all were men--long for that 5 o'clock -whistle. When the 65-year-old retirement age was enshrined in law, there were tens of thousands of such difficult jobs, and it should be no surprise that rather than die in the traces, many looked forward to slicing their birthday cake at age 65 with such strength as remained in their arms, and then doing whatever it is they had been dreaming about for the few remaining years they expected to be around.

That was then and this is now. Life expectancy at age 65 has gone from 77, when the Social Security system was established, to 87 today. Not all of the additional years are golden ones, of course, witness the rise in health care costs--which put some of the gilt on the golden years--as individuals age, some with infirmities that make work impossible. But work has become less tedious for many, and less physically demanding for many others. Still, opposition to raising the retirement age is thought to be so fierce that no politician dares speak the name of such a policy.

With some reason. A casual look at Labor Department data provided by an expert in these matters, my Hudson Institute colleague Diana Furchtgott-Roth, shows that for much of the post-World War II period a larger and larger portion of people over the age of 65 chose not to participate in the work force. In 1948, almost half of all men over 65, and 9 percent of women, worked. Thereafter, the portion of older men who worked declined steadily until around 1995, when only 17 percent of those over the age of 65 chose to continue in the work force (the portion of women declined only ever so slightly).

But then a funny thing happened. The trends reversed. Now, 22 percent of men in this age group, and almost 14 percent of women, remain at or return to work. And remember: anecdote should not be allowed to trump data in a matter such as this. Television provides the anecdotes: interviews with oldsters (I rather prefer the Australian word, "wrinklies") who have been forced by the decline in their 401(k)s to return to the work force. The Department of Labor provides the data, which show that the trend for older people to remain at work emerged more than a decade before the current collapse in asset values--during the boom years of the 1990s, in fact.

An even more interesting statistic is this one: The percentage of men 75 years and older who are counted as participants in the workforce is soaring, from 7.1 percent in 1987 to 10.6 percent--a 50 percent increase in two decades. As for women 75 years and over, many of whom have work experience and skills once not readily available to them, 5.5 percent now choose to work, more than doubling the 2.4 percent who made a similar choice in 1987. And none of these numbers include the older people who do unpaid volunteer work.

Could it be that even the joys of flat-screen, high-definition television sets and the multiplication of sporting events cannot offset reasons to eschew the couch for the workplace? Or that as Earl Weaver, manager of the Baltimore Orioles, once claimed, his wife married him for better or worse but not to have him home for lunch? Or that the thought of being trapped for 24 hours every day with a spouse but no new experiences to report makes many men and women flee to post-retirement jobs?