A Favor Economy in Which Kind Acts Come With Expected Reciprocity Lisa Larson-Walker The favor bank might include putting in a good word for a friend's child, getting into a fancy restaurant or even writing a Follow Friday post on Twitter. Some years ago, I had a friend who moved to New York with various aspirations, and until they were fulfilled he supported himself working at a restaurant. The place was cultish and bohemian - artists had started it - and interesting people worked there. Eventually my friend got to know the daughter of a famous actor there. On various occasions, he ate out with this woman and her father, noticing that when they did, the bill rarely arrived. This led my friend to one of his most astute and enduring observations about New York: "Only rich people eat for free." Where once an Upper East Side resident's needlepoint aphorism might have read, "Eat, Drink and Remarry," today we might find a different message stitched into a pillow. In the minds of the restaurant owners, the presence of a celebrity, at a time before every third person laid claim to the designation, was payment enough. Perhaps the celebrity would tell other celebrities to come to the restaurant; perhaps, feeling obliged to do something more, the actor would insist to reporters that he be interviewed there, ensuring that the name of the restaurant would appear in magazines and newspapers. Perhaps regular people, awed by proximity to a famous person eating sea bass, would return with greater frequency. In any event, a restaurant offering a free meal to someone who could easily pay for it was clearly hoping for a certain yield, in a form of tender even more valuable than a bitcoin. The favor economy - the performance or receipt of gestures, services and kind acts often with the implicit expectation of reciprocity - has quite likely been a driving force of life in New York at least since the days of the New Amsterdam colony. But we roll now in ways the Dutch could not have foreseen. If it is possible to tell the social history of modern, upper-class Manhattan in the evolution of the needlepoint pillow, then it is worth noting that on the Upper East Side, where we once might have found an aphorism like "Eat, Drink and Remarry," today we might find one that reads, "You Don't Know How Many Friends You Have ... Until You Have a Helicopter. The rise of a money culture, which has made the excesses of even the "80s seem comparatively quaint, and the heightened competition for status and access that has attended it mean that in New York today, if you belong to a certain caste, you will spend a lot of your time incurring nonmonetary debts and servicing them. The supremely rich are exempt from many of these exchanges because they can often buy their way into whatever it is they want, while the merely affluent or well-to-do must rely on fellowship, sincere or perverted, to move through their agendas. "Everything now has become so desperate, desperate, desperate," Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., the author of "Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America," said to me recently, an old-guard patrician's lament of the current deteriorating ways. A more benign interpretation of the favor economy is that it has a spiritual dimension: that favors done may be repaid indirectly through the various karmic recourses. In either case, you find yourself writing a letter of recommendation for admission to a private school that receives 36 applications for every available space, or you are in need of such a letter. You are helping someone you know get into a club (a literal or figurative one), partly because you like the person and partly because her father is on the board of an organization where you would like your 22-year-old child to work. You want a reservation at a restaurant that doesn't take any and is always packed so you call a friend, with whom you once generously shared everything you know about chess teachers for 5-year-olds, who has an acquaintance who works at the Food Network. This last example falls under the category of what the writer and performer Jenny Allen calls the compound favor: "It's not just that you have to write the letter or do x, but that to do those things you have to email a third person who is in London until Tuesday." Ms. Allen is the sort of person of whom many requests are made. For years, she had a vast apartment on the Upper West Side, which left friends repeatedly asking her if they could use it to throw book parties for other friends. She always said yes, she told me, because she felt that as a person with a rare commodity, ample square feet in Manhattan, she had a moral duty to comply. Email: bigcity@nytimes.com