Investors have too often extrapolated from recent experience. In the 1950s, who but the most rampant optimist would have dreamt that over the next fifty years the real return on equities would be 9% per year? Yet this is what happened in the U.S. stock market. The optimists triumphed. However,...

This essay was originally published in The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies (Burgess, 2010), and has since become a key reference point in debates on the finance-security nexus. It is reproduced here as a starting point for the present forum, which aims to further advance efforts to...