Another comment at P3 for this article, reposted...
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"Money is something of a shared delusion which we continue to share because of its utility... What was missing was 'credit', but that is simply an artifact of the game, not a real thing."

I took from your point, MT, that money is dangerous *because* a (delusionary) social construct. But it's only a shared delusion in the same way that language is - which is to say, so essential to us as a species that it can't really be considered delusional. A manifestation of that like money may be dangerously abstracted, but real as anything else we create with language structures.

There's an almost infinite space of ways in which we can collectively manage resources. Language and symbol (including money) are like a flock in that space. The elements have to be in close relation to each other, as it's their inter-relations that define them - the separate elements mean/do nothing in isolation. (I have some vague memory of this being a Wittgenstein point about language.)

But money is abstract compared to other structures we use (I've wiffled before about specific examples like Balinese rice management analysed by Lansing and Kremer in Priests and Programmers and Perfect Order, or van der Ploeg's work on Andean potato cultivation, which you can read in the Google book of 'Seeing like a State' here - only a few pages, but Scott does a great summary).

There's a parallel in Milgram's work on obedience to authority:

"While structures of authority are of necessity present in all societies, advanced or primitive, modern society has the added characteristic of teaching individuals to respond to impersonal authorities. Wherea submission to authority is probably no less for an ashanti than for an American factory worker, the range of persons who constitute authorities for the native are all personally known to him, while the modern industrial world forces individuals to submit to impersonal authorities, so that responses are made to abstract rank, indicated by an insignia, uniform or title." (p.137).

I don't think this means abstract resource management systems (like money) should necessarily be 're-embedded', though there are plenty of people who do (e.g. this on reputation currencies. Blech.) But - to take a specific example - if you think the future is likely to include computers, we'd be hard pushed to come up with anything better than money for organising their development & construction. Even a single component like a hard drive has production and design spread across a number of countries. If you could map the computer you're using now into money and information exchanges, how far would the network go, how many connections would there be? What else could achieve that?

The financial system's sort of combined a metastasised cancer with a worm-hole into another universe, where it grew uncontrollably and parasitised its useful social function. It shouldn't be beyond our wit to fix that.

Perhaps the oil question is actually relatively easier. Maybe no market mechanism (or other complex resource management structure) can deal with it. Perhaps it's simply a case of slowly making everyone realise it has to stay where it is, and declaring its extraction off-limits - as we do in National Parks now (though in how many places is that being reversed?) The message is at least very simple: we either keep it where it is, or we set up the conditions for unthreading civilisation. The question then becomes about how best to communicate that message? I can't help but think, however much I enjoy my ergonomic on-screen pontificating, this is going to require direct action. Think about how much difference the occupy movement made to the conversation about inequality. A liveable climate is more important than this.