The Favour Economy The Currency Nobody Counts

Consider the Soviet Union. At its most sincere narrative level, it was a civilisation engineered on the principle of equality, where the market had been abolished and the needs of the people were to be met without the indignity of price. And consider how it actually ran: on favours. To get a decent meal, a hospital bed, or a word with the right official, you did not queue; you knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone, and somewhere a debt was quietly recorded against your name.

Social scientists named this the “economy of favours”1 — the unofficial channel through which goods and information moved through a bureaucracy too inefficient to deliver them otherwise. The most equal society on paper turned out to be infested with a ledger of who owed whom.

The favour economy did not die with the fall of the USSR; it remains embedded in the social fabric, the practices, and the moral instincts of peoples across regions. Which raises the possibility that this was never a symptom of the structure at all, but part of the structure itself. The favour is never free. French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss2, writing about gift exchange a century ago, argued that every present carries a threefold obligation — to give, to receive, and, above all, to return — such that an unreciprocated gift leaves the recipient bound until the books are squared. The office has a softer vocabulary for the same equation: “a person easy to work with.”

The Organisation Within

The favour is not a corruption of the organisation; it is the organisation.

The reflex, on noticing the ledger, is to scrub out favouritism in the name of merit. But the favour is not the residue of the organisation; it is one of the legs it stands on. American sociologist Mark Granovetter’s3 problem with economists was exactly this: economic life is embedded in human relationships, with people leaning on particular others they trust. Trust does what contract cannot. Wherever people must co-ordinate under scarcity and uncertainty, they keep running ledgers of obligations. Strip the favours out, and you arrive at an engine that stalls.

The company, meanwhile, is the quiet beneficiary of all of it — harvesting the pooled social capital of its whole workforce for its own performance.4

Who Gets to Stand There

Being easy to work with is not a temperament; it is also a position.

If abolition is not the way, the next honest inspection is: how is it kept? And the moment you ask that, the cosy picture of mutual back-scratching falls away. The keeping is not evenly shared. American sociologist Ronald Burt5 put the matter into words without sentiment (paraphrased): advantage is a function of where you sit in the web of relationships, not how hard you row. Some people, astride gaps between disjointed groups — structural holes — hear of opportunities before others do. The better connected simply enjoy higher returns. Being affable, available, and fluent in reading the room’s unwritten mannerisms is not simply a pleasant trait you happen to have. It is a position you are accruing.

Yet in this ungoverned space, a prior question arises — not how a position is accrued, but who is permitted to begin accruing one at all. Not everyone enters the network from the same starting point.

A position can only be accumulated by those first allowed to stand in it. There is a blunt name for the barrier: inaccessibility. It tracks lineage, gender, ethnicity and region. But there is another term you are more familiar with — the old boys’ club. The ties are inherited and activated rather than built from nothing. Which is to say, the door stood ajar for some people before they were born. The research is not subtle: women are shut out of the male networking that does the allocation — the dinners, the drinking, the rituals.

No Neutral Gallery

This brings us to the property of the ledger that makes it so resistant to reckoning: it is positional. The identical gesture — a senior pulling a junior up, a word in the right ear — reads as generous mentorship to those within, and as cronyism, gatekeeping, or the old guard to those without. Fairness here is not a property of the act itself, but a function of where you are standing. There is no neutral gallery from which to audit it.

So the discomfort does not resolve, and it is not meant to. It is the organisation; it is the unjust underbelly of how people “get things done”.

What can be faced, rather than fixed, are its two asymmetries: that it pays out unequally based on which side of the debt you hold, and that it reads as virtue or vice depending on where you stand. The questions become: who is permitted to keep the ledger? And who is not permitted to pay in?

Which leaves the questions that you must answer: whose introduction first opened the door for you? And what can you do for everyone else?