Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832)

Who They Were

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) was a French economist and businessman, one of the leading figures who carried the classical political economy of Adam Smith into France and continental Europe. His Treatise on Political Economy (1803) became an influential channel for those ideas, helping to popularise and systematise Smith for a French-speaking audience. Say worked within the classical tradition that began with Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and ran through Malthus, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, and his name is permanently attached to one of the most debated propositions in economics -- a distinctive claim about the relationship between production and demand that would shape macroeconomic debate for well over a century.

Key Contributions

Say is remembered above all for Say's law, popularly compressed into the slogan that supply creates its own demand. His actual proposition was that a general glut of all goods at once is impossible, because the act of producing goods generates the income needed to buy them, so demand in aggregate cannot fall permanently short of supply. Ricardo defended the same idea, and it became a load-bearing assumption of classical macroeconomics -- John Stuart Mill built it into the system he codified in 1848. It is precisely this proposition that John Maynard Keynes would later single out and attack by name, arguing that economies can settle at a lasting shortfall of demand. Say's law therefore marks one of the main fault lines between classical and Keynesian economics.

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French economist who spread Smith's ideas in Europe and gave his name to Say's law: supply creates its own demand. Play the games that feature Jean-Baptiste Say:

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