Cheaper by the Dozen

This post isn't about curiosity.  It's free hypothesizing.

Here's a bit of freakonomics I can't find discussed anywhere.  Why are laws and contracts thicker now than they were in past decades or centuries?  The meme is that the people writing them are power hungry control freaks, or they need to justify their jobs or something.  I'm not sure I buy it.

Before I explain, let's make sure we're on the same page.  The law of supply and demand: if the cost of production goes down, the supply goes up; if the supply goes up, the cost of use goes down.  Now has anyone noticed that the cost of adding text to laws and contracts has been going down for centuries?

When documents began to replace customs in the 13th century all laws and contracts had to be handwritten.  The cost of hand copying documents, need I say, is prohibitive.  Because of low literacy they had to be read out loud to many.  The printing press changed that. After 1440 a ruler could print as many as were needed.  Drafts of laws were still a little pricy, but we'll solve that shortly.

It was 500 years before other improvements were made.  When they came, change was, in human history terms, rapid. Next came the typewriter in the mid-19th century, the mimeograph in 1890, the Xerox machine in 1949, the word processor, web pages, mobile devices.  As newspapers have discovered, the bottom has fallen out of the cost of producing and distributing text.  Why, then, are we surprised that laws and contracts have gotten more complicated?  

Attributing this phenomenon to some "essential" quality of legislators and lawyers is to mischaracterize the problem. In so doing, do we look to the wrong solutions? Do jokes about lawyers at the bottom of the ocean really help us? I can't say I have a solution either, but I'll confidently say I think we've been looking in the wrong place.