Mining some notes I made on my Kobo a while ago. What I love about Polanyi and The Great Transformation is that he does not ignore the cultural impact of economics and vice versa, as in this passage where he describes the true impoverishment of industrial dislocation:

England’s rural civilization was lacking in those urban surroundings out of which the later industrial towns of the Continent grew. There was in the new towns no settled urban middle class, no such nucleus of artisans and craftsmen, of respectable petty bourgeois and townspeople as could have served as an assimilating medium for the crude laborer who — attracted by high wages or chased from the land by tricky enclosers — was drudging in the early mills. The industrial town of the Midlands and the Northwest was a cultural wasteland; its slums merely reflected its lack of tradition and civic self-respect. Dumped into this bleak slough of misery, the immigrant peasant, or even the former yeoman or copyholder, was soon transformed into a nondescript animal of the mire. It was not that he was paid too little, or even that he labored too long—though both happened often to excess—but that he was now existing under physical conditions which denied the human shape of life.

Wish we could’ve preserved this tradition of economics where one actually strives to understand something rather than obfuscating it in math and jargon.