MANAGING YOUR MONEY : IN CLOSING : All This Talk About Money . . .

There was a time, not long ago, when it was still taboo to talk about money. The subject was right up there with race and class: pervasive, but unfit for polite dinner con versation.

Then something happened. Things changed. And what I wanted to know was, when did it become OK to talk about money? Stranger still, how on earth did it come to seem mandatory?

The answer turns out to have nettlesome implications. Like any right-minded moralist, I abhorred the Reagan-era obsession with precocious wealth and corporate success. BMWs give me emotional hives. Suspenders are the devil’s plaything. All this talk of money makes me shudder.

I still hate the acquisitive mentality. But I’ve come to believe that all the talk is something else again. I’ve come to believe the talk is--dare I say it?--a very good thing.

The reason is simple. When nobody talked about money, there were really two kinds of people: those with so much dough it didn’t need discussion, and those with so little there was nothing to discuss.

Things are different now. An awful lot of people have a little money. Sure, the Reagan Administration made the rich richer at the expense of the poor and middle classes--in some ways, with their complicity. But even if the concentration of American wealth has never stopped increasing, a huge middle class somehow sprang up.

This vast bourgeoisie is a relatively modern product of everything from estate taxes to World War II to a nation increasingly made and descended of extraordinarily motivated immigrants.

Significantly, the investment opportunities of this middle class have exploded.

Through mutual funds, the smallest savers have access to investment opportunities previously restricted--by tradition, fees and secrecy--to the rich. An article in this newspaper recently explained how someone with $1,000 could easily assemble a diversified portfolio reaching from Treasury bills to gold. Another reported that money managers catering to the very rich don’t particularly outperform funds open to any Joe or Jane Saver right off the street--good news to the 23 million households investing in mutual funds, up 400% in just a decade.

Not only does this help make capital markets efficient. It also makes them more democratic. What we have witnessed, in fact, in accelerating fashion since the Depression and with steps backward only in the 1980s, is the increasing democratization of money in America--something we all favor in principle but don’t always like in practice.

Telling people not to talk or think about money is like telling slaves to wait for heaven in the afterlife, or schoolteachers not to form unions. The stupid fact is that money is indispensable, not only to survival but for the leisure to create laws, art and so forth. Civilization would dry up without the stuff. The miracle is not that we talk about it. It is that, for so long, we didn’t.

So when did all this change? My friend Joe Nocera, who is writing a history of personal finance, pinpoints a single year. In 1972, he notes, the money market mutual fund was born, which enabled the average saver to earn an unregulated, market return, and what was then Time Inc. created Money magazine, which “brought money out of the closet.”

The forces that got us all talking about money are manifold. Joe’s favorite is inflation during the Nixon and Carter years. With prices and interest rates going haywire, these became a subject of obsessive concern. John Updike’s “Rabbit Is Rich” captures the period beautifully.

A related factor is the enormous increase in real estate prices in the past couple of decades. The deregulation of bank interest rates played a role, as did the astonishing bull stock market.

The growth of personal credit was equally astonishing and important. Trusty old M1, the favorite money-supply measure of Econ 1A, was nearly destroyed as a meaningful figure by money market funds and a zillion credit cards. Remember the old saw about the tidal wave that might result if everyone in China jumped off a chair simultaneously? Well, imagine what would happen to the velocity of money if every middle-class American whipped out the plastic in his pocket and simultaneously charged it to the hilt. All of us now have the power to create money; we’re like walking Federal Reserve Banks.

Let’s not forget women. The democratization of money included jobs for them, and increasingly, equal pay for equal work. Except for the odd paradox that all these new workers may have contributed to a price structure that makes two incomes seem mandatory, more women have become masters of their own finances. And since money is, to an unfortunate extent, destiny, they were suddenly masters of a lot more.

Good for them. Good for everyone. If we have to hear a lot of boring talk about money, well, personal freedom is not without its modest price. Anyone who thinks we overlook the Bronte sisters because we’re obsessing over money is crazy. Being poor certainly won’t help Johnny read, success in school being correlated to family income. More important, shutting up about money won’t make anyone better off.