Charles Rotter
Nicolò Badino, an economist at Bocconi University, has a working paper on the Little Ice Age and Northern Europe’s escape from subsistence agriculture. Out of the Cold: Climatic Adversity, Forced Industriousness and the Escape from the Malthusian Trap is dated March 1, 2026.
From the abstract:
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Northern Europe overtook Southern Europe, a reversal that preceded modern economic growth. I propose an underexplored channel for this transition: the Little Ice Age, a prolonged period of cooling and heightened climate volatility, whose economic impact was geographically uneven. Because agricultural productivity is non-linear in temperature, the same cooling tightened the subsistence constraint much more in colder regions. In a Malthusian economy this forced households to work more, and higher labor input accelerated learning-by-doing and induced innovation, raising agricultural productivity.
Badino develops the argument with a model and calibrated simulations of a colder North and a warmer South. His historical discussion follows farmers adopting clover and turnip rotations, improving drainage and building up soil fertility. The extra labour needed to survive poor harvests gave them more experience with which to improve their methods.
English farmers reacted to lower temperatures by increasing the flow of organic matter and manure into the soil; when temperatures rose again, the faster mineralization of soil organic matter led to bountiful yields that reinforced these innovative strategies.
The cold itself was costly. Badino’s discussion of the Greenland Norse describes settlements struggling as farming became marginal and sea ice hampered trade. He returns to that example when explaining how much climatic pressure his proposed mechanism can withstand:
This response requires the climatic pressure to be manageable: too severe a shock, such as in the Greenland case, leads to collapse; too mild, as in the Mediterranean core, reduces the incentive to innovate.
The full paper is here, including the model, simulations and historical references.
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Source: Nicolò Badino, “Out of the Cold: Climatic Adversity, Forced Industriousness and the Escape from the Malthusian Trap,” working paper, March 1, 2026. https://nbadino.com/files/01-out-of-the-cold.pdf
Featured image: Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape with Skaters, c. 1608. Rijksmuseum, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
H/T Ryan Maue