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The 'paradox' of swing resides in the expectation that 'if national influences were completely paramount,. swings would not involve identical fractions of the total vote or electorate in each constituency, but a fraction proportional to the prior strength of the party that was losing ground'. The mass of the evidence is however that swings are virtually equal across constituencies. The intention here is to demonstrate that the 'prior proportional' expectation is a mistaken one since it leads to a logical contradiction, and therefore that the phenomenon of equal swing is not paradoxical.

"Captain Swing" had small success in the West Midlands. As Hobs-bawm and Rudé correctly point out, Staffordshire and Shropshire were among those "counties only marginally affected by the labourers' movement". There were few cases of incendiarism and the whole episode in this area was somewhat anticlimacteric in character. Nevertheless the threat of "Captain Swing" in the last months of 1830 and into 1831 did not leave the West Midlands unmoved. It had the incidental effect of uncovering some of the otherwise subterranean rifts and divisions in rural society. In the fragments of evidence that survive, one can see that "Swing" induced a number of responses from the various sections of rural life in Staffordshire and Salop – attitudes were exposed and recriminations voiced. In effect, the fear of conflict rendered explicit social and economic circumstances which otherwise one can only guess at.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Kondratiev 's concept of "long waves," an interest which has not been restricted to Marxist analysts. The idea that the entire history of capitalism has been characterized by 50 or 60year cycles of expansion and contraction appears to have a modest amount of evidentiary underpinning, although the causes of this behavior are still uncertain and hotly debated. In this essay, Matthew Edel reviews several existing theories of the long swing and situates the oil "shortages" of the seventies as contributary but not determining influences in the current downswing. Many analysts agree that recovery from a Kondratiev downswing involves the condensation of capital around hitherto unexploited technologies or industries. Edel argues that new energy technologies are prime candidates for such a role, and goes on to compare a variety of energy alternatives with respect to their technical suitability. He then concludes with an examination of the longer term social and political implications of the alternatives at hand. Although Edel's choices of energy options may not win universal acceptance, the structure of his discussion will prove useful even to those who disagree most strongly.