Is social capital a fixed and scarce commodity?

A non-trivial portion of my time ends up being taken up making phone calls or writing notes on behalf of others, and increasingly peoples' kids. Conversely, as Graham has been making his way in the world, I have very little shame asking people to have lunch or coffee with him or, even better, nudging him to ask them. Before I'll advocate for somebody's kid, though, I make sure that I have coffee or at least a phone call with them to make sure I think they're an OK person.

Moreover, much of our social calendar ends up revolving around charitable and political fundraising functions at people's houses or at the sites of NGOs where they show off their work and talk about their plans for the future. Showing up to these events, giving the money, advocating for them, wearing their t-shirts and whatnot, all of this is social capital building. The giving earns one the right to ask for other's people's time and attention, at some crude level.

And all of this backchannel asking, favor doing, backscratching etc, viewed from the outside, could be construed as corruption. HR departments now remove names and alma maters from resumes before having them reviewed by decision-makers. Kyla Scanlon noted in a conversation with someone I listened to recently that the screening of her alma mater's name (Western Kentucky U) may well have helped her get her job at Capital Group, a large mutual fund company, despite the fact that she was valedictorian and ran D1 track.

I'm not sure what the right direction is. Certainly the social capital of having the relationships to get past gatekeepers through backchannels is relatively scarce because it takes a lot of conscious work to build up. But it is overwhelmingly how hiring is done, particularly in smaller organizations that have neither the prestige that drives volume of incoming job applications or the budget to set up blind screened hiring processes.

Informal channels are also how people and companies hire contractors, consultants, lawyers, accountants, doctors, lawn care people, and so on.

But is there any way over and around the very high costs of building social capital, and the impossibility of doing so for those who aren't well positioned to do so from the outset? I've been thinking about this a lot and will come back to it. Right now it's time to get organized to drive off this mountain in the hopes that this impenetrable mist breaks. At the very least we need to go to the grocery store.