Why So Many Americans Don’t Talk About Money

The taboos vary by class, job, and circumstance.

Joe Pinsker March 2, 2020

Americans love to talk about how Americans hate to talk about money. Indeed, recent surveys from financial and market-research firms have found that in 34 percent of cohabiting couples (married or not), one or both partners couldn’t correctly identify how much money the other makes; that only 17 percent of parents with an income above $100,000 a year had told (or planned to tell) their children how much they earn or their net worth; and that people are “more comfortable” talking with friends about marital discord, mental health, addiction, race, sex, and politics than money.

These results seem to point to a society-wide gag rule that discourages the discussion of financial details. But there are caveats. The companies that tend to publish findings like these stand to gain from persuading people to talk more about their money, if not with their loved ones, then with a professional financial adviser. They’re also, therefore, more likely to be interested in the psychological drama of people who make $100,000 a year than in that of people who make less.

Many Americans do have trouble talking about money—but not all of them, not in all situations, and not for the same reasons. In this sense, the “money taboo” is not one taboo but several, each tailored to a different social context. Money taboos are absent, or much weaker, in many countries and cultures outside the U.S., but when the conditions present in those societies exist in certain pockets of America, silence can give way to relative openness. Americans, in other words, are hesitant to talk about money—except for all the times when they aren’t.

When I asked Rachel Sherman, a sociologist at the New School, why Americans are reluctant to talk about income and wealth with their friends and families, she responded with her own questions: “What does it mean to ‘talk about money?’ Does it mean saying amounts of money, like [how much you earned last year in] numbers? Because I think that is taboo. But I also think we are kind of constantly talking about money.”

She pointed out that everyday conversation is filled with questions about what people buy, what they do for a living, where they went to school, and other subjects that serve as proxies for class position.

In fact, money taboos vary a lot based on class. Sherman told me that “people often just feel bad about how much money they have,” so “not talking about it makes that feeling of badness go away.”

In interviews with wealthy New Yorkers for her book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, she heard people say that they kept financial details private to spare their friends or children from feeling bad. She suspects that although this rationale is genuine, it’s also “a justification for silence” that prevents people from having to confront the unpleasant fact of their own wealth in an unequal society—that is, they’re ultimately sparing themselves.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/03/americans-dont-talk-about-money-taboo/607273/