Composing a Further Life

trying to get themselves established, who may feel obligated to fill the vacuum. So Social Security is not a program that just looks after one generation; it affects the entire household.”
    “Going back to the Chinese system that imposes obligations on children,” Ted mused. “An individual child may say, ‘My God! My whole life I’ve got to support my parents.’ Or somewhere in Africa, where the youngest unmarried daughter has to take care of the elderly parent—sort of a reverse system of primogeniture.”
    “That’s why many women aren’t getting married in Japan now; they don’t want to take on that job, which falls on the daughter-in-law.” This is typical of cultures where the bride goes to live with her husband in his parents’ home. Although this kind of direct caregiving is less common in the West, the next generation may inherit the tasks of dismantling a household or managing an intellectual estate, as I managed the intellectual estates of my parents for thirty years after their deaths.
    “I’ve always been interested in the conflict between the merit system and the legacy system,” Ted continued. “What is the function of the biggest legacy system of all, which is primogeniture? Theoretically, its purpose was to eliminate disputes. Even in this country, someone like Malcolm Forbes dies and he’s got five kids who want to run the empire, so what he wisely did was designate one person, who he thought best qualified, but sometimes there’s a rule that the firstborn gets it.”
    “It’s to prevent the breaking up of estates,” I said. “If you look at agricultural societies—look at Ireland, say—you’ve got a family living on enough land to support a couple and their children, and if each one of them marries and has children and all want to live on that land or divide it up, they’ve got to be starving. Primogeniture avoids disputes and sets it up so that the division of agricultural land into separate holdings remains at a level that can support a household. And the others may emigrate or find some other kind of work.
    “Now, in Islam the rules of inheritance theoretically divide the inheritance among all the children, and this can be a major problem, because holdings can get smaller and smaller and scattered around. You can do that with sheep and camels if the land they graze is essentially common land, because the heirs start off with a certain number and they will propagate. But if it’s land that you have to farm, you can’t start off with a small piece and have it propagate!”
    “Inheriting a white skin has been a legacy advantage and a black skin was a big disadvantage,” Ted commented. “Today, having a black skin may be an advantage in applying for certain positions. Being a woman has an important advantage in becoming a college president! Affirmative action has shifted the biological disadvantage to advantage in some contexts. I think that’s good. Who would dream that this could have happened?
    “It’s difficult to sort out good and bad in these legacy advantages and disadvantages. Does the legacy system always interfere with merit? Are legacy and merit always at war with each other? Now take a typical situation where, say, the head of IBM wants his son to be president. Now that’s in direct conflict with the merit system. People who rise to positions of power (a) want to hold on to them and (b) want to control where they go next, whether it’s property or wealth or influence. In college admissions, the merit system is overturned by the legacy advantage. They even call the kid who is admitted under the system a ‘legacy.’ ”
    “ ‘Unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him,’ ” I said, quoting Luke 19:26.
    Ted was pleased at the fact that in recent years the extent of scholarship support at prestigious academic institutions has increased dramatically, to the point of no tuition if parental income is below a certain amount. But the lifetime advantage of that kind of education has declined, and graduates of state universities are getting the top corporate jobs. “It’s very strange. Harvard recently said no loans. Princeton is free. But it didn’t seem to have much effect on black admissions. Large numbers of blacks at Harvard don’t need scholarships. It used to be that the blacks at the strong colleges were so-called ghetto kids, poverty kids. Not so anymore. Now they are