In the letters section of this week’s Economist which is dated September 7, 2017.

You don’t Say

The term “Say’s Law”, (Economics brief, August 12th) was invented by the American economist, Fred Taylor, and popularised in his introductory text, published in 1921. Moreover, the phrase “supply creates its own demand” is not classical in origin, but was first used in print by another American economist, Harlan McCracken, in a text that John Maynard Keynes is known to have read while he was writing the General Theory. Jean-Baptiste Say neither invented the concept nor was he its most staunch defender.

STEVEN KATES
Associate Professor
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing
RMIT University
Melbourne, Australia

And while you may think this is purely a factual statement about the construction of a book that was published more than 80 years ago, it is actually a suggestion that the mythological version of how Keynes came to write his book is many miles short of the truth. And as for the contents of the book, that falls even many miles shorter not just of the truth [how ridiculous to have argued that classical economists had no theory of involuntary unemployment] but of an understanding of how an economy first goes into recession and then recovers.