introducing BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | most adult Americans today are children of people who lived through the Depression. But since the 1930s we haven't had an economic disruption worthy of a capital letter -- no bout of '70s inflation or '80s recession has been so honored in memory. Money, for the majority of us, has been tamed: It's lost its mythic sway, its ability to make us quake. There may still be people starving in China -- or Africa, or India. But you won't often hear mothers reminding kids of that fact to get them to clean their plates; the supermarket shelves are groaning too loudly with rice and pasta imported from overseas. Yet if money is no longer our angry god, we have still inherited the taboos of our ancestors. We talk more freely about our bedrooms and our bodies than we do about our bank accounts. Our culture of confession has yet to make the short hop from our private parts to our pockets. "How much do you make?" remains a sensitive, even rude, query. Which is a strange thing for a society that takes pride in its pursuit of an "Information Revolution." With the Cold War a fading memory, communism defeated and socialism scorned, free-market capitalism is the only economic game in the global town -- and everybody knows that markets function most efficiently when information is most freely available. If the economists are right, then our job marketplace would function best if we all knew exactly what the person in the next office -- and the next city -- was bringing home. Nonetheless, the information revolution stops where our wallets begin. CEO salaries are published for stockholders and union salaries are posted for all to see, but most employees' compensation remains a matter between them, their bosses, their accountants and the IRS. For a company to post each person's salary in public remains a rare, radical act. Yet there's hardly a universal clamor for pay disclosure. Perhaps we're afraid that everyone else is making more than we are and we just don't want to know; or perhaps, conditioned by a workaholic mind-set and neurotic guilt, we suspect that we're making more than we really deserve. In a world that worships the marketplace, "How much do you make?" is uncomfortably synonymous with, "How much are you really worth?" Money is not just a "medium of exchange"; it is our totem and fetish object, and a mirror of how we view ourselves -- as shown by the revealing essay by Po Bronson that kicks off Salon's Money Week. Running in every section of our magazine all this week, you'll find a wide range of writing that explores the taboo of money -- and sometimes breaks it. When you've had your fill of our articles, come to Table Talk's new Money area and continue the discussion. SALON | Oct. 27, 1997 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - M O N E Y+W E E K A complete list of Salon's Money Week coverage - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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