3. When and why did money become a taboo subject?

When and why did money become a taboo subject?

In the absence so far of someone with a true historical answer, I'm going to make an interesting side note / observation.

My wife's family is from a 3rd world country. In their country, it is 100% expected and normal to ask people to their faces how much they make. It's like a normal "nice to meet you" type of thing.. "Hey, nice to meet you, I'm bob, I'm a welder, I make $15k a year...". It barely even makes sense back home to be reluctant to talk about your finances.

Now as my wife (and relatives / friends) have moved to the US, they quickly began to stop talking about finances. Those questions quickly disappeared, and they started dodging those questions back home.

I found this whole social concept fascinating, and talked to my wife / her friends about it for awhile. The best explanation we could come up with is this:

Back home in 3rd world country - Everyone was generally equally poor. If you made $5k a year, or $5.5k a year, there isn't a huge advantage. If someone did manage to make $7.5k a year, it was only polite and nice to say "Hey guys, you can make a HUGE amount more money dragging rocks for ABC corporation rather than XYZ corporation." Many jobs don't require much skill. Many jobs are socially given (I have X contact in the government, I'll get you a job). Even jobs that require skills (Computer science for example), don't pay a huge amount more than other jobs. So it is considered socially polite to talk about how much you make, how your friends can make more, etc.

Once you're in the US, you realize that skills are critical. You & your friend made $5k in this 3rd world country, you as a computer programmer, him as a teacher. You come to the US and start making $110k. He takes forever to find a job, and finally makes $25k. This salary discussion is suddenly incredibly uncomfortable. You're wildly more "successful". He can't possibly just "get a job" using your connections, because your actual job is super critical to your pay.

And lets not even talk about how crazy everything will sound to your friends/family back home. When $8k is a wildly successful person in a 3rd world country, your $25k salary now comes across as crazy amazing.. and if you make $100k you're now the "unbelievably rich" person, rather than the normal friend.

In the end, I think it comes to salary imbalance. In one country most salaries are similar, so people are comfortable to chat about it. In the US (western world), salaries are very very different, and so it is uncomfortable. People tend to assign personal value to income levels, and the differences make the conversation not work.

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