Aug 19, 2026
There are unspoken rules in American business that are inscrutable to outsiders (immigrants, poor kids, etc.) They're not made inscrutable maliciously; rather they're so ingrained it wouldn't occur to anyone to explicitly state them. One of the most important ones is: you don't ask a business associate for something you couldn't get on an open market yourself.
e.g. you don't expect your most loyal investor to fund you if you can't raise elsewhere. You don't develop a good relationship with your boss and expect them to give you a raise if no one else will hire you at that price. Doing these things is experienced as undue familiarity that fractures the relationship.
But you do the exact opposite in low trust cultures like eastern europe. In that world the whole point of associates is patronage-- a means to extract something you couldn't obtain on the dysfunctional market by yourself. And if someone refuses such a request despite having ability to grant it, that would be a relationship-fracturing breach of norms.
Roughly, in high-trust societies business relationships are a mechanism to preempt the market, in low-trust societies they're a mechanism to defeat the market. I suspect this is why despite being overrepresented in the lower tech rungs, eastern europeans are underrepresented as the rungs move up. People are unable to parse or adapt to new rules, and so their careers begin to lag and eventually stall.
(Someone should write "High-trust norms for dummies" or something. Likely a very high leverage activity to unblock a lot of talent.)