In 1696 England introduced a tax on windows. The reasoning was sensible: counting windows from the street required no entry into a private house, and a larger house had more windows, so the tax fell on wealthier owners.
What happened next is visible in British towns today. Owners bricked up windows. New houses were built with fewer. In poorer tenements, where the tax was calculated per building rather than per household, landlords removed windows from rooms that families lived in, and did not reduce the rent.
Doctors began to object within a few decades. Rooms without windows were darker, damper and much worse ventilated, and outbreaks of disease followed the pattern of the bricked-up walls. The tax had been designed as a measure of wealth and had become, accidentally, a tax on daylight and air.
It was finally repealed in 1851 after a long campaign, and a phrase from that campaign survives in English: daylight robbery.
The case is used in economics teaching for a specific reason. Nobody intended any of it. The designers chose a visible, easily counted proxy for wealth, which is exactly what good administration is supposed to do, and the proxy turned out to be something people could change. Any measure that people can alter more cheaply than the thing it measures will eventually be altered instead.
Vocabulary in this text
- introduce /ˌɪntɹəˈdus/ — to bring something in for the first time
- reason /ɹˈizən/ — why something happens
- require /ɹˌiˈkwaɪɚ/ — to need something
- brick /bɹˈɪk/ — a block of baked clay used for building
- calculate /ˈkælkjəˌleɪt/ — to work out an amount using numbers
- landlord /ˈlændˌlɔɹd/ — a person who rents out a property
- reduce /ɹəˈdus/ — to make something smaller or less
- rent /ɹˈɛnt/ — money paid regularly to use a home
- decade /dɛˈkeɪd/ — a period of ten years
- outbreak /ˈaʊtbɹˌeɪk/ — a sudden start of a disease in an area