2022.03.02 为什么这么多美国人不谈钱？

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Why So Many Americans Don’t Talk About Money
The taboos vary by class, job, and circumstance.

By Joe Pinsker
A dollar bill with a zipper over George Washington's mouth
Matt Anderson Photography / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
MARCH 2, 2020
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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.

Read: Rich people rarely tell their kids how much money they make

Among middle-class Americans, the ban on talking about money is instead often brought on by financial precarity. Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropologist at New York University, interviewed dozens of middle-class families for her recent book Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. She told me that to the families she spoke with, being middle class meant not being financially reliant on family, friends, or the government. “Under the conditions of [economic] fragility, protecting a middle-class identity meant silence about money,” she said. “Silence protects the idea that a middle-class family is independent and will be into the future, even if that’s not the case.”

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In working-class communities, meanwhile, the money taboo can be weaker. Jennifer Silva, a sociologist at Indiana University who has researched the coal-producing region of Pennsylvania, told me that the working-class families she’s interviewed didn’t hesitate to disclose specifics about their income, rent, or expenditures. “People would say, ‘I’m an open book,’ and be straightforward, open, not ashamed,” she said. They freely discussed “the challenges or even impossibilities of supporting a family on minimum-wage work” and “how they would make their budget stretch, such as buying ground meat in bulk and freezing portions to make it last.”

“There is a racial difference in how people talk about money,” Frederick Wherry, a sociologist at Princeton University, told me in an email. “By the numbers, the racial wealth gap between African Americans and whites is [roughly] one to 10, so it is hard to have a taboo around something that hardly exists for you.” Some financial struggles may be inescapable, Wherry noted, but certain black communities have developed practices to talk about them with optimism. He cited the “uplifting [tone of] gospel and sermons: ‘Manna from heaven in a time of need,’ ‘the widow’s jar of flour that does not run out.’”

Even if no single taboo around money exists across every segment of American culture, it’s possible to take a wider view of the function that financial silences serve. Societies with significant wealth disparities are “inherently unstable,” Jeffrey Winters, a political-science professor at Northwestern University, told me. The idea is that the have-nots fight to claim some resources for themselves while the haves fight to defend what they own, whether violently or more subtly.


Thus, taboos around money—among haves and have-nots alike—exert a sort of stabilizing force, blurring how much people actually have and giving them one fewer reason to be upset with their place in society. “The bubbles of denial that people operate within are sustained by taboos on talking about money, which in turn helps sustain the unequal society itself,” Winters said.

One common explanation for the particular sway money taboos hold over Americans is, as Zaloom put it, the widely held belief that “your value as a human being is somehow made material in your pay and in your accounts.” If people were to publicly reveal their income, Zaloom said, they’d be “exposing how they’re valued by their employer and how their contribution is valued even more broadly, by the community.”

Read: Who actually feels satisfied about money?

Other researchers I consulted had different, but no less compelling, theories as to why direct discussions of money can produce social tension in any society. “Money gets tied up in all sorts of moral problems and provokes taboos because its special task is to translate qualities into quantities,” Gustav Peebles, an anthropology professor at the New School, told me. “Anything that is for sale has a host of qualities—even a jug of milk—that necessarily must be reduced to a singular price.” He noted that pricing a gallon of milk might not itself pose a moral dilemma, but this conversion of the subjective to the ostensibly objective is more fraught when it involves human labor and value.


Jeremy Jones, an anthropologist at the College of the Holy Cross who has studied cultures of money in Zimbabwe, hypothesizes that people’s openness about a particular expenditure or investment might have to do with the time horizon associated with it. To take one example, debt can be such a sensitive subject because “the ramifications of [it] can extend far beyond the here and now,” he told me.

Meanwhile, inquiring about the cost of a friend’s lunch yesterday—a transaction with likely limited connections to the past and future—generally isn’t off-limits. But if the time horizon of that small purchase were extended—if that friend were trying to save aggressively to buy a house in five years, and wanted to avoid expensive lunches—the money spent would become more loaded with meaning, and possibly shame.

The time-related taboos that Jones described have likely been around for a while, but the particular taboos around talking about money in present-day America are probably about a century and a half old, according to Eli Cook, a history professor at the University of Haifa and the author of The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life.

“In the late 19th century and early 20th century, I think many Americans internalized the lessons of mainstream neoclassical economics, which suggested, through [the economist] John Bates Clark’s theory of marginal productivity, that everyone earns what they in fact produced,” Cook told me. Before this period of industrialization, Cook said, workers had less of an expectation that their pay would reflect their talents and abilities, because they were well aware of the leverage their employers had in setting wages; but in the 20th century, as those economic ideas took hold, wages became something that workers might deduce their own worth from. Similarly, Zaloom traces the link between financial value and personal value to the German sociologist Max Weber’s work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was published at the beginning of the 20th century.


James Suzman, an anthropologist who has studied and written about the Ju/’hoansi, a group in southern Africa that lived as hunter-gatherers well into the 20th century, has seen money taboos develop firsthand. When different groups of Ju/’hoansi first encountered money at various times in the past half century, Suzman told me in an email, they didn’t have any qualms about discussing it. But after the introduction of money and wage labor, Suzman said, “people who earned money soon become circumspect about talking about it among those who didn’t, largely because if they talked about it, others would demand a share, often putting strain on relationships.”

But even though wage labor is common throughout the rest of the world, it does not necessarily produce taboos like the ones in the U.S. Cook told me that in Israel, some people openly discuss salary information. He attributes this to a range of potential factors, including a lower cultural premium on privacy, higher levels of unionization (“Once it’s collective bargaining, it’s not as personal”), a sense of society-wide solidarity (“There is a notion that ‘Together we can make sure the boss isn’t screwing us’”), and a desire to seem savvy (“People like to show off that they are good hagglers and will brag how they got the best deal. They do this with everything—why not salaries?”).

Read: Ask your (male) colleagues what they earn


Other societies provide examples of how financial value need not be equated with personal value. Kimberly Chong, an anthropology lecturer at University College London, told me that when she studied the office of an American consulting firm in China, the mostly Chinese consultants “freely shared information about how much they earned with each other and also felt emboldened to ask senior executives how much they earned.” To the frustration of management, this made it difficult to sustain the pay differentials that are common at American companies.

In America, “asking someone what they earn is considered taboo because you are indirectly questioning their personal worth,” Chong writes in her book Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China. “By contrast, in China personal worth is not primarily indexed to financial worth, but rather one’s ‘quality’ (suzhi), the moral and ethical values that cannot be reduced to economic value.”

When conditions like those in Israel and China are introduced into certain segments of American society, money taboos can dissolve. Zaloom noted two contexts in which American workers’ pay is less connected to their perceived worth: unions and government jobs. “In unions, everybody knows how much everybody else gets paid, because it’s a part of contract negotiations,” she said—the feeling of being valued in a certain way by the larger economy might still be present, but so is the sense that one’s pay is simply the product of the union’s negotiating power.


The outcome is similar for public workers, whose pay is often standardized, and determined by clearly defined criteria. “There’s a bureaucratic rationality to the pay that disconnects it from a sense of moral responsibility,” Zaloom said.

Money also becomes more openly discussed under particular household circumstances, as Viviana Zelizer, a sociologist at Princeton, pointed out to me. “We know taboos are broken during various times of crisis,” she said, noting the examples of divorce or a family illness.

In many countries, the taboos around talking about money are weaker not because of collective bargaining or standardized pay, but because people’s livelihood often depends on a full and accurate accounting of each household member’s earnings, expenditures, and deals. “In some societies, the money taboo is instead constant chatter—how much things cost, how much jobs pay, how much the currency is worth—as a way of making sense of one’s place in the world,” Allison Truitt, an anthropology professor at Tulane University, told me.

She cited Vietnam as an example of one such society where people tend to talk more directly about money. In part, that’s the case because earnings are relatively low and arrive at irregular intervals, which sparks speculation in everyday conversation. It also has to do with the fact that some people depend on remittances from relatives abroad, so discussions of financial specifics naturally feature in family life.


Read: How money became the measure of everything

Similar forms of this “constant chatter” are found elsewhere as well. In a 2018 article for Vice, the writer Paulette Perhach noted that in Paraguay, “people openly ask how much you make, how much your phone costs, and even, one time when I handed someone a present, how much I paid for it. When I told the birthday girl how much her gift was, she chided me that I’d overpaid, and told me I should have gone to another store for a better price.”

These Paraguayan and Vietnamese examples don’t map cleanly onto American communication habits, but their matter-of-fact approach to money is reminiscent of the “open-book” mentality that Jennifer Silva noticed in American working-class households where money was tight.

Even if America’s money taboos are not exceptional, their strength derives from conditions particular to the U.S. “I think it has something to do with the incompatibility of the idea that we have a democracy in which all citizens are equal and the fact that we have a class system that produces a lot of inequality,” said Rachel Sherman, the sociologist. Other countries might have high levels of inequality too, she noted, but perhaps weaker democratic ideals and less faith in meritocracy.


But worldwide, a sensitivity to money, and to the significance of having a lot of it, is on some level inescapable—monitoring and modulating the financial signals one sends seem to be nearly universal impulses. Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue, a development-sociology professor at Cornell University, told me that when income or wealth is invoked as a status symbol, it can spark a competition with others that will be unpleasant for all involved. “For that reason,” he said, “people will refrain from the most blatant forms of self-puffery unless they are absolutely necessary or effective.”

“If you must display your money, you strategically select occasions that draw sympathy and avert the retaliatory arms race,” Eloundou-Enyegue said. “In Ghana, for instance, families may spend large fortunes on elaborate funerals, to display wealth under the veil of grieving.” As a society or group becomes more affluent, he said, overt status displays become more frowned upon—hence wealthy Americans’ (only slightly) subtler references to certain zip codes, vacation destinations, or private schools.

Sherman raised the point that, for the purposes of sizing up a peer, those proxies for class position might even be more useful than knowing someone’s precise income. That is to say, in some cases, Americans might not talk about money in precise terms simply because they don’t need to. When clues like where you live, where you went to school, and where you travel are mentioned in conversation, Sherman said, “the number almost becomes unnecessary.”

Joe Pinsker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



家庭
为什么这么多美国人不谈钱？
这些禁忌因阶级、工作和环境的不同而不同。

作者：Joe Pinsker
乔治-华盛顿嘴上有拉链的美元钞票
Matt Anderson Photography / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
2020年3月2日

美国人喜欢谈论美国人如何讨厌谈论钱的问题。事实上，最近来自金融和市场研究公司的调查发现，在34%的同居夫妇（无论结婚与否）中，一方或双方不能正确识别对方赚了多少钱；只有17%的年收入超过10万美元的父母告诉过（或计划告诉）他们的孩子他们的收入或净资产；人们与朋友谈论婚姻不和、心理健康、成瘾、种族、性和政治比谈论钱 "更舒服"。

这些结果似乎表明，整个社会有一个不鼓励讨论财务细节的禁忌规则。但也有一些注意事项。倾向于发布此类研究结果的公司会从说服人们更多地谈论他们的钱财中获益，如果不是与他们的亲人，而是与专业的财务顾问谈论。因此，他们也更有可能对年薪10万美元的人的心理活动感兴趣，而不是对年薪较低的人的心理活动感兴趣。

许多美国人确实有谈钱的困难，但不是所有的人，不是在所有情况下，也不是出于同样的原因。在这个意义上，"金钱禁忌 "不是一个禁忌，而是几个禁忌，每个禁忌都是为不同的社会环境量身定做的。在美国以外的许多国家和文化中，金钱禁忌是不存在的，或者说弱得多，但当这些社会中存在的条件在美国的某些地区存在时，沉默就会让位于相对的开放。换句话说，美国人对谈论金钱犹豫不决--除了他们不谈论的时候。

当我问新学校的社会学家雷切尔-谢尔曼，为什么美国人不愿意与他们的朋友和家人谈论收入和财富时，她用自己的问题来回答。"'谈钱'是什么意思？它是否意味着说钱的数量，比如[你去年赚了多少钱]的数字？因为我认为那是禁忌。但我也认为我们是在不断地谈论钱。" 她指出，日常对话中充满了关于人们买什么、他们做什么工作、他们在哪里上学以及其他作为阶级地位代理的话题。

事实上，金钱方面的禁忌因阶级不同而有很大的差异。谢尔曼告诉我，"人们往往对自己有多少钱感到不爽，"因此，"不谈论它可以消除这种不爽的感觉。" 在为她的《不安的街道》一书对纽约富人的采访中。富裕的焦虑》一书中，她听到人们说，他们对财务细节保密是为了不让他们的朋友或孩子感到不舒服。她怀疑，尽管这个理由是真实的，但它也是 "沉默的理由"，使人们不必面对在一个不平等的社会中自己的财富这一令人不快的事实--也就是说，他们最终是在保护自己。

请看。富人很少告诉他们的孩子他们赚了多少钱

在美国中产阶级中，禁止谈论金钱的做法反而往往是由财务不稳定带来的。纽约大学的人类学家凯特琳-扎鲁姆（Caitlin Zaloom）为她最近出版的《负债》（Indebted）一书采访了几十个中产阶级家庭。家庭如何不惜一切代价让大学工作。她告诉我，对与她交谈的家庭来说，中产阶级意味着在经济上不依赖家人、朋友或政府。"她说："在[经济]脆弱的条件下，保护中产阶级身份意味着对金钱保持沉默。"沉默保护了中产阶级家庭是独立的，并将在未来独立的想法，即使事实并非如此。"

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同时，在工人阶级社区，金钱的禁忌可能更弱。曾研究过宾夕法尼亚州产煤区的印第安纳大学社会学家珍妮弗-席尔瓦（Jennifer Silva）告诉我，她采访过的工人阶级家庭毫不犹豫地披露了他们的收入、租金或支出的具体细节。"她说："人们会说，'我是一本开放的书'，并且直截了当，公开，不感到羞耻。他们自由地讨论了 "靠最低工资工作养家糊口的挑战，甚至是不可能"，以及 "他们如何使自己的预算得到扩展，例如大量购买碎肉并冷冻部分以使其持久。"

"普林斯顿大学的社会学家弗雷德里克-惠里在一封电子邮件中告诉我："人们谈论金钱的方式存在着种族差异。"从数字上看，非裔美国人和白人之间的种族财富差距[大约]是1比10，所以很难对你几乎不存在的东西产生禁忌。" 惠里指出，一些财务斗争可能是不可避免的，但某些黑人社区已经形成了以乐观态度谈论这些问题的做法。他引用了 "福音书和布道的振奋人心的[语气]。'在需要的时候来自天堂的吗哪'，'寡妇的面粉罐子不会用完'"。

即使在美国文化的每一个部分都不存在关于金钱的单一禁忌，我们也可以从更广泛的角度来看待财务沉默的功能。西北大学的政治科学教授杰弗里-温特斯（Jeffrey Winters）告诉我，具有显著财富差距的社会 "本质上是不稳定的"。这个想法是，没有钱的人争取为自己争取一些资源，而有钱的人则争取捍卫他们拥有的东西，无论是暴力还是更微妙的方式。


因此，围绕金钱的禁忌--在富人和穷人之间--产生了一种稳定的力量，模糊了人们实际拥有的数量，使他们少了一个对自己的社会地位感到不满的理由。"温特斯说："人们在其中运作的否认的泡沫由谈论金钱的禁忌来维持，这反过来有助于维持不平等社会本身。

对于金钱禁忌对美国人的特殊影响，一个常见的解释是，正如Zaloom所说，人们普遍认为 "你作为一个人的价值在某种程度上体现在你的工资和账户上"。Zaloom说，如果人们公开披露他们的收入，他们就会 "暴露出他们是如何被雇主看重的，以及他们的贡献是如何被社会看重的，甚至更广泛。"

阅读。究竟谁对金钱感到满意？

我咨询的其他研究人员对于为什么直接讨论金钱会在任何社会中产生社会紧张关系有不同的理论，但也同样令人信服。"新学校的人类学教授古斯塔夫-皮布尔斯（Gustav Peebles）告诉我："金钱被捆绑在各种道德问题上，并引发禁忌，因为它的特殊任务是将质量转换为数量。"任何要出售的东西都有一系列的品质--即使是一壶牛奶--都必须被还原成一个单一的价格。" 他指出，为一加仑牛奶定价本身可能并不构成道德困境，但当涉及人类劳动和价值时，这种将主观转化为表面上的客观的做法就会更加麻烦。


圣十字学院的人类学家杰里米-琼斯（Jeremy Jones）曾研究过津巴布韦的货币文化，他假设人们对某项支出或投资的开放程度可能与与之相关的时间跨度有关。举个例子，债务可能是一个敏感的话题，因为 "它的影响可能远远超过此时此地"，他告诉我。

同时，询问一个朋友昨天的午餐费用--一个可能与过去和未来联系有限的交易--一般来说也不是禁区。但是，如果那笔小交易的时间范围被延长--如果那位朋友想积极储蓄，以便在五年内买房，并想避免昂贵的午餐--那么花的钱就会变得更有意义，而且可能是耻辱。

海法大学历史学教授、《进步的定价》一书的作者伊莱-库克说，琼斯描述的与时间有关的禁忌可能已经存在了一段时间，但在当今的美国，围绕谈论金钱的特别禁忌可能有一个半世纪之久。经济指标和美国生活的资本化。

"在19世纪末和20世纪初，我认为许多美国人内化了主流新古典经济学的教训，它通过[经济学家]约翰-贝茨-克拉克的边际生产力理论提出，每个人都能赚取他们事实上生产的东西，"库克告诉我。库克说，在这个工业化时期之前，工人们对他们的工资能够反映他们的才能和能力的期望较低，因为他们很清楚雇主在确定工资方面的杠杆作用；但在20世纪，随着这些经济思想的深入人心，工资成为工人可以推断出他们自身价值的东西。同样，Zaloom将财务价值和个人价值之间的联系追溯到德国社会学家Max Weber的作品《新教伦理与资本主义精神》，该作品于20世纪初出版。


詹姆斯-苏兹曼（James Suzman）是一位人类学家，他研究并撰写了关于Ju/'hoansi的文章，Ju/'hoansi是南部非洲的一个群体，在20世纪一直作为狩猎采集者生活，他亲眼目睹了金钱禁忌的发展。苏兹曼在一封电子邮件中告诉我，在过去半个世纪的不同时期，当不同的Ju/'hoansi群体第一次遇到金钱时，他们对讨论它没有任何疑虑。但在引入货币和雇佣劳动后，苏兹曼说，"挣钱的人很快就变得谨慎起来，在那些不挣钱的人中间谈论它，主要是因为如果他们谈论它，其他人会要求分享，往往会给关系带来压力。"

库克告诉我，在以色列，有些人公开讨论工资信息。他将此归因于一系列潜在的因素，包括对隐私的较低文化溢价，较高的工会化水平（"一旦是集体谈判，就不像个人那样了"），全社会的团结意识（"有一种观念是'我们一起可以确保老板不坑我们'"），以及看起来很聪明的愿望（"人们喜欢炫耀他们是好的砍价者，会吹嘘他们如何得到最好的交易。他们对任何事情都这样做--为什么不在工资方面？"）。

阅读。询问你的（男性）同事他们的收入情况


其他社会提供了财务价值不需要等同于个人价值的例子。伦敦大学学院的人类学讲师Kimberly Chong告诉我，当她研究一家美国咨询公司在中国的办公室时，大部分的中国顾问 "自由地与对方分享他们赚了多少钱的信息，也觉得有胆量问高级管理人员他们赚了多少钱。" 令管理层沮丧的是，这使得美国公司常见的薪酬差异难以维持。

在美国，"询问某人的收入被认为是禁忌，因为你是在间接质疑他们的个人价值，"Chong在她的书《最佳实践》中写道。管理咨询和中国金融化的伦理。"相比之下，在中国，个人价值主要不是指经济价值，而是指一个人的'品质'（suzhi），即不能简化为经济价值的道德和伦理价值。"

当像以色列和中国这样的条件被引入美国社会的某些部分时，金钱的禁忌就会被解除。Zaloom指出，在两种情况下，美国工人的工资与他们的感知价值联系较少：工会和政府工作。她说："在工会中，每个人都知道其他人的工资是多少，因为这是合同谈判的一部分。"被更大的经济体以某种方式重视的感觉可能仍然存在，但一个人的工资只是工会谈判能力的产物的感觉也是如此。


公务员的结果也类似，他们的工资通常是标准化的，并由明确定义的标准决定。"Zaloom说："薪酬有一种官僚的合理性，使它与道德责任感脱节。

正如普林斯顿大学的社会学家Viviana Zelizer向我指出的那样，在特殊的家庭环境下，金钱也变得更加公开地被讨论。她说："我们知道禁忌在各种危机时期被打破，"她指出了离婚或家庭疾病的例子。

在许多国家，围绕谈论金钱的禁忌较弱，不是因为集体谈判或标准化薪酬，而是因为人们的生计往往取决于对每个家庭成员的收入、支出和交易的全面和准确核算。"杜兰大学的人类学教授Allison Truitt告诉我："在一些社会中，金钱的禁忌反而是不断的喋喋不休--事情要花多少钱，工作要付多少钱，货币要值多少钱--作为了解一个人在这个世界上的位置的方式。

她以越南为例，说明在这样的社会中，人们往往更直接地谈论金钱。在某种程度上，这是因为收入相对较低，而且到达的时间不固定，这在日常谈话中引发了猜测。这也与一些人依赖国外亲戚的汇款有关，因此在家庭生活中自然会讨论财务细节。


阅读：金钱如何成为衡量一切的标准

这种 "不断唠叨 "的类似形式在其他地方也有。在2018年为Vice撰写的一篇文章中，作家Paulette Perhach指出，在巴拉圭，"人们公开问你赚了多少钱，你的手机多少钱，甚至有一次，当我递给别人礼物时，我为它付出了多少。当我告诉生日女孩她的礼物是多少钱时，她责备我说我多付了钱，并告诉我应该去另一家商店买更好的价格"。

这些巴拉圭和越南的例子并不能完全映射出美国人的交流习惯，但他们对金钱的实事求是的态度让人联想到珍妮弗-席尔瓦在美国工人阶级家庭中注意到的 "开卷有益 "的心态，那里的钱很紧张。

即使美国的金钱禁忌并不特殊，它们的力量也来自于美国的特殊条件。"我认为这与我们有一个所有公民都平等的民主制度的想法和我们有一个产生大量不平等的阶级制度的事实不相容有关，"社会学家雷切尔-舍曼说。她指出，其他国家可能也有高水平的不平等，但也许民主理想更弱，对任人唯贤的信念更少。


但在世界范围内，对金钱和拥有大量金钱的意义的敏感度在某种程度上是不可避免的--监测和调节一个人发出的金融信号似乎是几乎普遍的冲动。康奈尔大学的发展社会学教授Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue告诉我，当收入或财富被作为一种地位的象征，它可以引发与他人的竞争，这对所有参与者来说都是不愉快的。"由于这个原因，"他说，"人们会避免最明目张胆的自我吹嘘形式，除非它们是绝对必要或有效的。"

"如果你必须展示你的钱，你就战略性地选择能吸引同情的场合，避免报复性军备竞赛，"Eloundou-Enyegue说。"例如，在加纳，家庭可能在精心设计的葬礼上花费大量财富，在悲伤的面纱下展示财富。" 他说，随着一个社会或群体变得更加富裕，公开的地位展示变得更加不受欢迎--因此美国富人对某些邮政编码、度假胜地或私立学校的提及（只是稍微）微妙。

谢尔曼提出了这样一个观点：对于衡量一个同行的目的来说，这些阶级地位的代用品甚至可能比知道某人的确切收入更有用。也就是说，在某些情况下，美国人可能不会以精确的术语谈论金钱，因为他们不需要。谢尔曼说，当谈话中提到你住在哪里，你在哪里上学，以及你在哪里旅行等线索时，"数字几乎变得没有必要"。

乔-平斯克是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。