7 ms·
From my perspective, in American culture very few people are mature enough to handle discussing income without feeling a hugely inflated ego or completely infer
by warent 5y ago
From my perspective, in American culture very few people are mature enough to handle discussing income without feeling a hugely inflated ego or completely inferior to their peers. (Maybe true elsewhere but I can't speak to those places!) The reason it's kept secret is because people can't help but turn it into the proverbial dick measuring or whatever is a more polite way of putting it.
As for the American Dream, it still strikes me as integral the American Dream, I think you just have a different idea of how you wish it was.
EDIT: Also from what I've heard anecdotally, Americans are actually more open about money than most other countries, especially Scandinavian ones.
- chrsig 5y agoI don't think it's really fair to reduce it to dick measuring when there's just a ridiculously enormous class divide.
- ehutch79 5y agoOr both. It can be both.
- FredPret 5y agoThe dicks will mostly be compared within classes, if at all. It’s not going to be decamillionaires and thousandaires comparing notes on the golf course.
- mrep 5y agoAll my friends have STEM or business degrees and I'm pretty sure I make 2-6x more than every one of them because I work at a top paying software company. I don't want to talk about that.
- andy_jensen 5y agoThe notion that you earn 6 times more than your peers is also absurd. You dont work 6 times as hard/much and your time isn't 6 times more valuable than your friends. In my ideal world everyone made the same amount of money since we are all equal. Then you would get your software degree to avoid collecting garbage or wiping old people in a nursery home. Now think of CEO's making 100x other people
- warent 5y agoI have a communist buddy who runs a profit pool with like 4 other people where they share an office doing different (often unrelated) work and combine/evenly distribute all of their income/paychecks. Ever since meeting him, I'm automatically skeptical that most people are just reciting platitudes without much real belief behind it.
- mrep 5y agoWhy? I probably do produce more than 6 times value. Their work only impacts one individual customer at a time whereas mine scales to over a billion customers. They can retrain and join my megacorp if they want reducing the supply for their job and increasing it for mine which should theoretically reduce the pay gap.
- brightlancer 5y agoAmerican culture is really broad. I don't see the immaturity angle. I think lots of folks become envious and it creates hostility, but envy shouldn't be written off as immaturity. In some cultures in the USA, money issues are kept private. And even among the cultures where it isn't, individuals may be comfortable sharing it themselves but not with others sharing it, or it being broadcast to the world.
- duxup 5y agoI imagine if some information like that was available... it would just come and go like nothing happened for most Americans. Some spats here or there, and the typical social media outrage, but nothing significant. Plenty of information out there about who makes how much and it doesn't really matter.