J.-B. Say

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Jean-Baptiste Say, lithograph by Gottfried Englemann after a portrait by Achille-Jacques-Jean-Marie Devéria.

H. Roger-Viollet

J.-B. Saywas a French economist, best known for his law of markets, which postulates that supply creates its own demand.

After completing his education, Say worked briefly for an insurance company and then as a journalist. In 1794 he became an editor of a new magazine dedicated to the ideas of the French Revolution; he later became editor in chief of the magazine. He was appointed to the Tribunate under the consulate in 1799 but was later dismissed by Napoleon. In 1807 he started a cotton-spinning mill, which he sold in 1813. Next he held a chair in industrial economy at the Conservatory of Arts and Crafts from 1817 to 1830, and he was a professor of political economy at the Collège de France from 1830 until his death. His major publication was Traité d’économie politique (1803; A Treatise on Political Economy).

Say attributed economic depression not to a general weakness in demand but to temporary overproduction in some markets and underproduction in others. Any imbalance would adjust automatically, he believed, because overproducers must either redirect their production to meet their customers’ preferences or be forced out of business.

There are two versions of Say’s law—one proved to be true, the other false. The true version states that a glut of goods cannot persist over a long term because the production of goods will motivate producers to buy other goods. In Say’s words, “Products are always exchanged for products.” This represented a significant new understanding of markets because economists before Say had worried about the possibility of a long-term glut. There is, however, the false version of Say’s law, which Say appears to have also believed; it states that there cannot be an overproduction of goods in the short term. British economist Thomas Malthus, with whom Say was acquainted, attacked this version in the 19th century, as did John Maynard Keynes in the 20th century.

(Read Thomas Malthus’s 1824 Britannica essay on population.)

Say was the best-known expositor of Adam Smith’s views in both Europe and the United States. But he disagreed with Smith’s labour theory of value. Say was one of the first economists to realize that the value of a good derives from its utility to its user—not from the labour used to produce it. This insight was not systematized until the early 1870s, when Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Friedrich von Wieser gave it further attention.