Who you know

I think maybe 5% of economic activity in New York is actually on the books. In reality, almost all labour is under the table, and there is, as I am discovering, a whole lot of shit that gets done through barter. Friend gets Yankees tickets in exchange for dog-sitting. Other friend teaches martial arts and has been invited out to party houses in the Hamptons. Other friend lives rent-free in return for teaching her roommate Japanese. Yes, it often has this surreal inequivalence to it. "You're going to give me this in exchange for that?" You can get a sense of this if you read Craigslist: the entire city turns on some fetish-inflected quid pro quo.