The triumph of Keynes …
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was one of the most famous economists of the 20th century. He challenged the prevailing classical economic view that full employment was guaranteed by the operation of free markets and argued that the economy could get stuck in a state of unemployment, a situation that required government intervention to correct. His ideas found traction because of the economic hardship during the Great Depression of the 1930s. An important example of Keynesian economics in action is provided by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” implemented between 1933 and 1939 in which government aggressively tried to stimulate the economy by means of investing heavily in infrastructure, including the construction of roads, bridges, dams and public buildings. Trenchant critics of Keynesian economics refer to this particular aspect of policy as providing employment for “digging holes and filling them up again”.
You may wonder what on earth produced this musing on Keynesian economics, a subject which I studied avidly as a young graduate student but subsequently lost touch with. Having recently taken delivery of our Wiltshire Horns (the "ladies who munch") we have embarked on a process of trying to organise their living quarters. The main problem we faced was a series of sinkholes in their paddock along the route of an underground winter creek. To mitigate the chance of a fatality we hired a man and his digger to come and open up the creek and turn it into a shallow swale thus making it completely visible and therefore unlikely to cause injury.
But alas, in the words of the Scottish bard, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” After opening a trench about a metre deep (and much deeper in some places) along the path of the creek there was still no evidence of any water. It became apparent to us that the original owners had filled the creek with tonnes of rocks and then packed even more tonnes of soil on top and compacted it. The sink holes we had observed must simply have been the erosion of the packing material over time. Eventually we had no option but to adopt the Keynesian solution, namely, filling the trench back up and compacting the soil once more. We hope that it will be at least a decade before further intervention is required when, inevitably, the sinkholes start appearing again. It is true, however, that the end result is actually quite pleasing.
The ladies who munch are now quite settled in their new quarters and are starting to become quite used to us. One of their number (#221) is actually quite a forward little miss. She will gladly allow you to give her a stroke so long as there is food in the bucket for her to gobble up. The other ladies are more circumspect and while they are happy to approach and eat any treats, they won't let us touch them yet. This whole idea of being sheep farmers is very new. To be honest, if you had told me only a few years ago that Cath and I would be keeping an eye out for sheep grazier alerts from the Bureau of Meteorology, I would have raised a quizzical eyebrow!
The next big task of course is to introduce the dogs to the sheep and vice-versa. This is going to take some patience. We took them down the hill to the lower paddock on leads a day or so ago. Of course Pepper just wanted to run like mad but with no real idea of what the end goal was. Knut on the other hand just wanted to bark very loudly and bounce up and down in his goofy, but delightful, way. We kept them out of the paddock on this first visit and merely tried to get them to sit and be calm. The exercise was a limited success and we look forward to seeing how the relationship develops ...
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