>Having lived in this country for forty years, I can vouch for the
>fact that people will talk about anything (private sex lives,
>addictions, anything) except for their salaries. Corporations don't
>have to work very hard to enforce this; it's in the culture.
As I wrote in a footnote to the first page of Wall Street: "There is a curious reticence about money, not only in economics, but more throughout American culture - curious because both the discipline and the culture are built on an obsession with money. Along these lines is R.C. Lewontin's (1995) observation that the only two questions in the famous 1994 survey of Sex in America that were asked in private, written form rather than explored in face-to-face interviews were those on masturbation and household income. American culture is almost as obsessed with sex as it is with money, but the obsessions are fraught with ambivalence and denial."