The Last Shame in America
Why is everyone so squeamish about money?
July / August 2003
By Perry Glasser, North American Review
Try this: Throw a party. Announce that guests will be required to expose their net worth and income to total strangers. Bring a brokerage statement! Show us your pay stub! Come on, don’t forget your year-end bonus! Give it a whirl! Chips, beer, and full financial disclosure! Who can resist a theme party?
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Well, in this case, nearly everyone.
Secrecy surrounding money is so ingrained that silence is a matter of social propriety. What if we went to the party and learned that we make less—or more—than our friends? Neither situation is socially tolerable. We welcome our isolation; it keeps us safe from shame.
If you are fulfilled and daily go forward with absolute confidence that your lifetime of effort will culminate in an extended twilight of comfort and creativity for you and the people you love, you need read no further—just list the contents of your medicine cabinet, please.
The rest of us exist in constant low-grade economic terror. Like those harmless but noticeable electric charges that imprison dogs in unfenced backyards, low-grade terror and shame about money make us work harder, longer, accept authority, and leave us feeling grateful to our employers, which, in fact, generate the voltage of fear that runs beneath our feet.
Like mutts free to roam only so far in the backyard, we devote ourselves to a corporate master as though it had our best interests at heart. Corporations benefit from the shame that surrounds money because employees who share what they know about compensation hamper productivity. Honest executives will admit that when it comes to compensation policy, their job is to observe the legal minimums for such things as wages and maternity leave and to otherwise squeeze every ounce of effort possible from every employee.
Achieving high productivity at low cost is simply good management. If compensation policy were conducted in the open with equal information available to all, no one could object. But it is not conducted openly, because corporate apologists cannot justify the discrepancies: How is it possible that highest-level management can receive compensation 300 times greater than the lowest-paid employee’s? Why do male employees earn more than female employees? Comparing pay stubs would plunge a company into a bog of dark issues about fairness that have nothing to do with company purpose—profit.
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