The Invisible Economy

There was this lady, she is a trained lawyer but she had gotten married and stopped her practice. She took care of her two kids until they were 14 and 12 years old. Then came a family crisis, her hubby got into some kind of scandal and went to jail. She found herself thrust into the role of the breadwinner and she had to wrestle for jobs with people 15 years younger. Anyway, one of her old Uni friends is a partner at a firm. He wants to hire her but the board will have to vote because there are other applicants who are equally promising. Her friend in high places indirectly asked a board director to vote for this lady, which the board director did. So this middle-age lawyer lady started work at a junior position. She proved worthy and gained recognition after two years there. Then came the day where she had the budget and headcount to hire a junior assistant. She had select candidate B over another candidate A, however, to her astonishment, her management turned away candidate B and hired candidate A for her (candidate A being a niece of a board director). This lady was furious, she confronted her supervisor (her ex-Uni friend), it was then her friend revealed to her that two years back he had asked for a favour from the director to swing his vote for her and now it is time for him to return the favour and to hire the director's niece. This is an example of "The Invisible Economy" in terms of Business. By the way, candidate A didn't know of her privilege, plus she is also a superb, efficient & effective lawyer, so in that sense, she just needed the chance to prove herself. So anyway, that is what they call it The Invisible Economy, a network of friends to get thing moving. My kind of Invisible Economy is less complex. It involves just small, little stuff we do for each other, like getting breakfast or bringing back some nice food from nice restaurants, or recommending each other the good stuff (example now it's the fermented kefir craze, so we make our own fruit vinegars that taste like wine).