Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Classic Cliffhangers

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I’ve been re-reading some bestselling tomes from my economics library and was very struck reading the foreword of one at how the same concerns tend to come up again and again. The writer was talking about how world trade was reaching a point of exhaustion, how foreign competition was hollowing out western economies, and how the cycle of boom and bust has reached a point where it seems to have stabilised into a flatline of permanent and chronic depression, that seems likely to extend indefinitely into the future until drastic economic changes are made. Worrying stuff from Friedrich Engels, who was way ahead of most commentators saying the same thing nowadays as he was writing his foreword to the english translation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital back in 1886. I’m on the edge of my seat to see how it all turns out when Karl Marx gets around to finishing the sequel, which is racing to publication with George R R Martin’s next book in his Game Of Thrones series.

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