If I ran the British government, to promote more heterodox thinking I would employ a small cadre of French people as an alternative sounding board. I know it may seem ridiculous to seek advice from a country which makes tea with lukewarm water and thinks Johnny Hallyday was better than Elvis but, if only by the law of averages, they can’t be wrong about everything.

And on the subject of pensions and retirement, they may have a point. The reaction to pension reform in France is a lesson in how two adjacent countries can frame the same problem in completely different ways. When the retirement age is raised in Britain, we shrug. In France, they set fire to things.

It is fascinating to see how many young people in France are thronging the streets to defend their right to play a lot of pétanque in 40 years’ time. If I were a young Frenchman, would I not resent paying high taxes so that train drivers can retire at 55? It seems not. On the other hand, is that any worse than for a young Londoner to pay most of their after-tax salary in rent so their landlord can live off their labour? In Britain it is the property market, not the pension system, which redistributes wealth from the young to the old. (One strange feature of Anglo-Saxon economics is that all economists are agreed that rent-seeking is bad, and yet no economist ever proposes any action to discourage it.)

For good and ill, the French accord economics a far lower status in their decision-making hierarchy than Anglo-Saxons do. In Britain, economic logic decides everything; in France, it is secondary to qualitative considerations. A friend of mine lived in Paris near the city’s finest ice-cream shop. It closed for the whole of August. He once suggested that it might make sense for them to open in August, and close in January. ‘We tried opening in August once,’ they explained. ‘It was a nightmare, there were queues all along the street.’ There is a Platonist mentality in France which holds that economic reality is all very well, but it shouldn’t interfere with your philosophical ideals. This is what allows them to grumble endlessly about McDonald’s while eating there more than we do, or to assert the superiority of French cinema while queuing up to watch Fast and Furious 37.

But surely the French are right to see pensions as a philosophical question as much as an economic one? After all, what economics wants us to do is to work constantly until the age of 75 and then drop dead the next day. The government worries about those people who retire too soon, or who save too little for retirement – but cares nothing for the large group of people who work too long, save too much for retirement and then don’t live to enjoy it. By incentivising people to go on working too long, you are forcing them to play a game of chicken with their own mortality and good health. They are also gambling on the continued good health of their spouse. It may be good for the economy if you leave it too late to retire. But for you personally, replacing a life filled with business appointments with a life filled with hospital appointments is not much of a win.

Perhaps we in Britain need to be a bit more French about this. At the very least we could lay out a few demands for more flexibility. The legalities around UK pensions are almost certainly damaging individual welfare by forcing people to behave in ways which are financially optimal but bad for our quality of life. Why, say, can you not retire for a couple of years in your fifties and then return to work when you get bored? I once met a taxi driver who had cracked the problem. After a year of tedious retirement, he developed a simple life-hack. ‘When it rains, you make a lot of money driving a cab, and you can’t play golf.’ Every day he got up, looked at the sky, and decided whether he was retired or not.