The standard use of money is vital to the staple finance that accompanies large-scale storage economies. No assessment and collection of taxes, no bu… - Karl Polanyi

What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.

the neoliberal utopia of a borderless and peaceful globe requires that millions of ordinary people throughout the world have the flexibility to tolerate — perhaps as often as every five or ten years — a prolonged spell in which they must survive on half or less of what they previously earned. Polanyi believes that to expect that kind of flexibility is both morally wrong and deeply unrealistic. To him it is inevitable that people will mobilize to protect themselves from these economic shocks.

Anthropologically, money should be defined as a semantic system, broadly similar to language; writing, or weights and measures. These systems differ mainly in the purposes served and the signs employed. Language and writing serve the purpose of the communication of ideas, weights and measures that of quantitative physical relationship. As to signs, language uses oral sounds; writing employs ideograms or visual characters; weights and measures, on the other hand, use physical objects as the basis of symbols.
Money resembles, but also differs from, each of these. It serves several ends, which are traditionally described as means of payment; standard of value or money of account; store of wealth; and medium of exchange.