One economist has a theory about journalists that may apply to lawprofs as well. Here is an excerpt:
WHY are there so many well-padded books out there that really ought to be nice, long articles? The subject came up over dinner the other night, and having just wrapped up a nice, long article, I think I may have an answer to this question: journalists, like many non-economists, do not properly understand sunk costs.
Sunk costs are expenses that have already been incurred and cannot now be recovered. They have a peculiar effect on the human mind, inducing us to incur further costs rather than give up the money or time already spent. So rather than giving up on a disastrous IT project, companies spend another $100,000 to “rescue” the previously expended funds. You have probably seen the same behaviour among friends:perhaps at a casino, where at least one member of the party inevitably refuses to leave the casino because he has already lost £1,000 pounds. How having lost a great deal of money somehow makes it a better idea to stake large sums on a game where the percentage is always to the house . . . well, perfectly rational people don’t gamble, do they? At any rate, the practice is common enough that we have a folk term for it: “throwing good money after bad”.
In the case of authors, particularly journalists, they generally expend a great deal of time, effort, and emotional frisson in writing a good-sized article. At the end of it, the author is invariably left with far more material than he can cram into five or ten thousand words: reams of statistics, loads of telling anecdotes, pages of interviews with charming and intelligent people who said nice things about their new suit, and ever so many sparkling epigrams with which he longs to entertain someone besides himself. The natural response is to seek an outlet for this overflow, at which time a lightbulb appears. “I will write a book!” he says to himself, rubbing his hands in glee. “A book will use all this excess material.”
Via Yet Another Sheep.
