Now I am not sure how right Polanyi is: it is not clear to me that the shift has been as large as he thinks it has. And when "embeddedness" was used in the past to enforce transactions at a "just price", it usually seems to me to have been cover for thugs-with-spears (or thugs-with-idols) getting things on favorable terms from merchants, artisans, and peasants: it is far from clear that a decline in "embeddedness" is a bad thing. But I do think it is an interesting point.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Now I am not sure how right Polanyi is: it is not clear to me that the shift has been as large as he thinks it has. And when "embeddedness" was used in the past to enforce transactions at a "just price", it usually seems to me to have been cover for thugs-with-spears (or thugs-with-idols) getting things on favorable terms from merchants, artisans, and peasants: it is far from clear that a decline in "embeddedness" is a bad thing. But I do think it is an interesting point." in the context of "J. Bradford DeLong, On the 'Embedded Economy' Thesis (1997)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.