Check out an unsurprisingly good piece from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about the development of the bete noire of good urbanites everywhere - shopping malls.

It's a wide-ranging piece, but the most interesting element is Gladwell's focus on the tax code as the unsung hero or villain of the spread of malls: apparently the accelerated depreciation schedule put into the code in the 1950s made it efficient to overbuild malls. Everything old is new again, as similar incentives in the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s contributed to overbuilding of office towers.

The story is further evidence of how small changes in, or features of, the tax code have monumental impact. Pick your favorite example: the role of the mortgage deduction in inflating the price of housing (and while I haven't seen any studies of the issue, it wouldn't shock me if the Clinton doubling of the amount of tax-free gain from the sale of a home has played a role in the housing bubble we may be facing), the quirk that exempts the donor of appreciated property from capital gains taxes, or the historical accident of exempting employers' health-insurance premiums that has helped produce (probably more than anything else) the wonderful state of health care in this country. The first example is probably the mos timportant, as it illustrates both the distortions of such tax-code changes and the diffculty of getting such quirks out once they've been absorbed into the economy (let's have a show of hands for who wants to destroy the real estate sector!). If there's a moral to the story, it's "don't go down that road." But it's a little late for that advice, so the second-best advice is probably to go to the drugstore at your friendly neighborhood mall and buy some aspirin.