Little Ice Age

Hello and welcome to Macrodose, a podcast hosted by me, James Meadway, that brings you your weekly fix of everything economics in a quick 15-minute roundup.

In today's episode, we'll be looking at, first, Continuity Chancellor John Healey's first budget is due in just five weeks, and second, the Greens have a new economic policy published due for discussion at the party conference.

Our first story is about John Healy's first budget as Chancellor on the 28th of October, and its increasingly straightened circumstances.

The headroom he inherited from Rachel Reeves, £24bn at the Spring Statement in March, has been badly eroded.

Strictly speaking, the rules don't target the whole deficit.

The first, the stability rule, says day-to-day costs must be met by revenues so that the government only borrows to invest, as the phrase has it.

The second, the investment rule, says public sector net financial liabilities, which is a measure of government debt, should be falling as a share of GDP by 2029-30.

The headroom, everyone quotes, is measured against the first of these rules.

Yeah, in some ways, they have two events that are out of their control coming together in the worst possible way.

The first one is this period of climate change, what we think of as the Little Ice Age.

It leads to famines.

It leads to all kinds of disruptions in the local economies, and what you start having are people that the palace call bandits and rebels, but you and I might call people who are so hungry they will do anything for their next meal, including following a charismatic figure who says, "I will take you there." And that's going on inside of China.

And the weight of the evidence is that it was climatic.

The Little Ice Age has spread from Europe, and its biggest impact starts around 1300 AD, and it made things cold and dry.

and that would have then meant it was impossible to grow anything here.

Now maybe for a few years they're bringing stuff in as tribute from better areas, but after a while they just can't do that, they can't maintain it, and they have to leave.

Mm.

Because Europe went through this period called the Little Ice Age-

Mm-hmm

... ah, from about 1300 to about 1850, and the idea is Stradivari got all of his wood from a particular forest in Italy, and it came from particular spruce trees.

Whatever natural cycle you think it might be.

We're coming out of the Little Ice Age.

Whatever you think it is, it's not that.

Right.

Oh, absolutely.

You have to remember that all this warming trend began at the end of the Little Ice Age around 1865, and then sort of the, the warming kicked up again with the, uh, onset of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s.

And then especially since the mid-20th century on, it sort of climbed, uh, c- uh, quite steadily.

Um, so yeah, we live in a warming world, and as the world warms, so do the mountains.