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French windows
I always come back to Jim and always see something new. I’ve been reading up on passive solar heating and south-facing windows as a measure of reduced space heating–and the unintended consequences of that measure–only to stumble on James Scott’s discussion in Two Cheers for Anarchism of what was arguably an inverted and analogous problem of ecological design: too much heat from the state!
The officials of the French absolutist kings sought to tax their
subjects’ houses according to size. They seized on the brilliant device
of counting the windows and doors of a dwelling. At the beginning of the
exercise, the number of windows and doors was a nearly perfect proxy
for the size of a house. Over the next two centuries, however, the
“window and door tax,” as it was called, impelled people to reconstruct
and rebuild houses so as to minimize the number of apertures and thereby
reduce the tax. One imagines generations of French choking in their
poorly ventilated “tax shelters.” What started out as a valid measure
became an invalid measure.
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