The Door and Window Tax

In the 17^th century, coins in England were regularly ‘clipped’ to siphon off the gold and silver. When penalties failed to curb the practice, the Crown decided to accept and demonetize all circulating coins irrespective of their quality. Since the quantity of gold to mint new coins was higher than what was collected from the demonetized ones, William III introduced the Window tax. The tax was a precursor to the Income tax. The reasoning was that the larger the house, the greater the number of windows and hence larger the tax collected. A window tax also didn’t require the assessor to enter the dwelling. The tax was soon introduced in France too.

I first came across this instrument in James C. Scott’s magisterial work on Public Policy, ‘Seeing Like a State’. In it Scott explains that the unintended consequence of the tax was that people decided to board up their windows and built houses with no windows. What was supposed to be a window tax ended up becoming a tax on air and light. Soon disease prevalence in the communities increased and it was the poor who suffered. A classic case of public policy landing up with random outcomes.

The trigger for this post was Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’ . I’ve been engrossed in it for the last two weeks. In the first section, we are introduced to the magnanimous Bishop Bienvenu who in a sermon speaks the following:

“My brothers and friends, there are in France thirteen hundred and twenty thousand peasant cottages which have only three outlets, eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand which have only two, a door and one window, and three hundred and forty-six thousand which have only a door. This is due to something known as the tax on doors and windows. Consider the fate of poor families, old women and young children, living in those hovels, the fevers and other maladies! God gives air to mankind and the law sells it. I do not assail the law but I give thanks to God.”

Just one of the many examples from the classic showing what a keen chronicler of his times Hugo was.