Truck and Barter

David Warsh, zeroing in on why the NYT, WaPo, and FT ignored the Harvard-Russia-Project scandal:

Instead, the informal economy of capitalism is one of deference and respect, of favors today and the implicit promise of favors later, of jobs and dinner invitations and admissions to exclusive kindergartens. Its texture is extremely uneven: dense around, say, academic medical centers and aerospace contractors; sparse where incentives are weak; and, at least in democracies, full of relatively empty seams in the appropriate places, between countervailing sectors. Anyone who doubts that this informal economy extends to newspapers knows nothing about how newspapers work.