Why do people find simple questions offensive?
Because answers to these questions are outside of some people’s comfort levels for discussing with people that aren’t close friends or family. Other people don’t care. This is a cultural difference. I’ll gladly tell you how much money I make or how old I am. However, I know that some people don’t like to freely divulge this information so unless I feel like I know them pretty well (or have some reason I need to know like I’m getting them a birthday card or I don’t know what a good reason might be…) I won’t ask. There are a whole host of other questions that people feel similarly about. Some of these are more obvious than others. – how much someone weighs – whether someone’s child was planned or an “accident” – how much sex a couple has – whether you’ve slept with your new paramour yet – whether you’ve sought treatment for your anxiety problems etc. Different cultures have different ideas of what sort of stuff is appropriate to be shared with which people.
Also, I’m among the “people who will say that these questions are not taboo for anything to do with differential reproductive fitness and assortive matching”. I think they’re taboo for the reasons qwip describes. I don’t think we need to believe that all human motivations have to do with reproductive fitness to believe that people don’t want to lose face by admitting they don’t make a lot of money, and don’t want to enter a conversation where there’s a game of “who makes more money” (or who weighs less, etc) happening. In some cultures, eg old money northeast USA, discussing money at all is exceedingly tacky (maybe insulting, because it suggests that the other person would need to be thinking about money?), to the point that parents don’t discuss estate planning with their adult children.
I agree strongly with ambrosia and damn dirty ape here. While I have no doubt there are people who don’t like discussing how much money they make solely because they are embarassed at how low that figure is, I think it is a gross oversimplification to claim that is the only reason asking such a question is considered rude (or to assume that only those on the lower end of the economical scale would to get offended at such a question). It’s a rude question because there is simply no useful information that can be gained from having it answered besides having your basest curiosities satisfied for absolutely no practical purpose.
I’m not sure of this, but I think talking about how much money you make is mostly just taboo in the States (and possibly other Western countries). A friend of mine holds that the taboo on asking about wages helps to maintain imbalances of wealth; if people really knew how much other people were making, they might not be as satisfied with what they were getting. Conversely, they might have more sympathy towards the truly poor and try to work for better wages for them. I recall having loads of questions with people who were bemoaning how little money they made. I would ask them how much they made and they’d hedge and haw and finally tell me the number. It was almost always higher than what I was making at the time (about $17,000 after taxes). Not asking the question allows rich people to think that they are worse off, and poor people that they are better off, than they really are.
