“How is it,” a friend recently asked, “that it’s possible to mobilize public opinion against nuclear energy without fighting on the terrain of physics, but impossible to do so with finance?”

Wait a second: wasn’t she forgetting the Occupy Wall Street movement? The now pervasive and pejorative use of the words “shadow banking,” or “financialization”? The bank-bashing? Insofar as the public thinks about finance at all, the parallels to nuclear power are there: something that’s perhaps necessary, yet easily and endogenously prone to disastrous systemic failure. We may not all have heard of Hyman Minsky, but we are all Minskyans now.