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Wealth and Age: King Lear
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« *Update* Shame on CMS | Main | Posted Without Comment »
December 5, 2007 |Permalink |Comments (1)
Wealth and Age: King Lear
The one unalterable fact with which aging related public policy must contend is that...
"You can't take it with you."
Financial capital is no good to the dead. Social capital matters only to the living.
Society must therefore find effective and just means for transmitting wealth across the generations. It must.
Just think of Shakespeare's Lear. An aging monarch, convinced of his own decrepitude, whose intention is " To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburden'd crawl toward death."
How did it work out? Well, the play is among the Bard's greatest tragedies and nearly all of the main characters are dead before the closing curtain so let's just say that Lear does not offer a firm footing for thought in this area.
Lear transfers his financial capital en bloc to his two older daughters and thereby makes himself into a pauper. He banishes his youngest and most beloved daughter and thereby squanders the greatest part of his social capital.
Following this act of unparalleled folly, the King still expects to retain the full measure of his status and authority. The fool is right when he names the King the greatest fool of all. "Thou shouldst not have been old, till thou hadst been wise. ....."
There is a nexus, a dynamic interplay between social and financial capital which the fool understands but the King does not.
Fathers that wear rags
Do make their children blind,
But fathers that bear bags
Shall see their children kind.
This is the essence of the problem with which public policy and its bigger stronger cousin, human culture, must forever struggle.
How shall the transmission of wealth across the generations be meshed with the intergenerational social obligation?
Comments ( 1)
It all depends on what kind of capital the parents have built up to pass on.
Amassing physical wealth, property, glories, riches, requires constant vigilance to protect. Offspring are held in thrall to the prospects of inheriting some or all of that earthly glory.
Building, nourishing, cultivating family and friendship bonds, links to loved ones, old stories told and retold, are human and spiritual capital that can't be given away and that keep offspring coming back for more.
I was lucky to have parents who continued to earn our love and affection and trust and eager connection until death. They both continued to grow into more full, more exciting, more engaged humans until, so far, only my mother's death. We children vied for who could visit when, with limited bed rooms. We travelled in bunches, carrying our sailing canoes and kayaks to beautiful places where we played and ate and continued the conversations, well into my parents old age.
Now, with my step father still telling amazing stories as he sinks into a wheelchair that we are keeping away from him so he retains his muscletone, he has written in his mind a novel of 24 chapters. A filmmaker son in law will record the telling of those chapters, all about the Civil War, rewritten to a more satisfying outcome.
That is a transfer of wealth that can never be exhausted and that nourishes each one of us.
My biological father, on the other hand, pursued wealth and glory. He died a pauper, having disinherited two sons and shortchanged a third because they "were a disappointment to him". These sons, who will never recover, argued for months that the will should be contested, that the stepmother had poisoned him and stolen all of his money. A gruel thin legacy.
Which basket should one lay one's eggs in?