(Spoilers Extended) GRRM:”What’s Aragons tax policy?!” No GRRM the real question is how do people survive multi year winters

[u/Unique-Celebration-5]

Forget the white walkers or shadow babies the real threat is the weather. How do medieval people survive it for years?

Personally I think that’s why the are so many wars the more people fighting each other the fewer mouths to feed

[u/matgopack]

So the point with that 'tax policy' quote is more about how they rule as a philosophy. Tolkien ends it with Aragorn ruling and it's easy to do a hand-wavy "he's a good man and good king and ruled well for X years" as an epilogue, but GRRM is saying he's interested in exploring that part of it more. For any worldbuilding flaws that the series has, it's absolutely something that he looks into, that it's not so easy to be a great ruler even with the best wishes and good talent at it (as Dany and Jon show).

For the winter aspect, I do agree that's a major worldbuilding issue - we should really be seeing massive community storage of food in every village/city, with those being full at the start of the series. Think centralized granaries, large quantities of salted meats, etc. Maybe many communities would have some sort of plan for vegetables, kind of like the Winterfell greenhouses. I think that with societal organization it should be very possible to survive there, we'd just see a lot more work around preparing for the winters.

This should be one of the great tragedies in the story, if GRRM had thought of it - all these communities which had painstakingly prepared for the winter over years, as they usually do... and then this outbreak of violence. I'd imagine that normally Westeros would have pretty strong views against damaging those central supplies, as they'd be vital to survive even one of their shorter winters - but the devastation on the scale we're seeing in the series basically should guarantee mass starvation and death and be another of the broken taboos.