Extreme weather in the 1430s triggered a major economic crisis in England, leading to food shortages, livestock deaths, and widespread disruption, reshaping landholding practices.
Certain folks would like to tell you that inflation is cured. And in some ways, if you track inflation by the Consumer Price Index, there is some truth to the thesis that the cost of living has returned to its normal, modestly upward path. Ponder a California inflation index from my trusty spreadsheet, which averaged four decades' worth of annual changes in regional price indexes for Los Angeles-Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco.
Economists from the US, Canada and France were awarded this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in economics on Monday, the final award of this year's Nobel week. Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel economics prize for "having explained innovation-driven economic growth", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The prize was awarded at a ceremony in Stockholm and is the final Nobel of this year's prize season, with prizes for peace, medicine, physics, chemistry and literature revealed last week.
The later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have long occupied an intriguing and contested place in discussions of England's long-run economic development. One key issue around which debate has coalesced is the living standards of the population as a whole and of different groups within it. We contribute to this debate by bringing forward new evidence on the material living standards of peasants, artisans, and wage-earners in the countryside and small towns.
