Tag Archives: Say’s Law

Why don’t economists get it?

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China, India, Japan, US and Europe have weakening or underperformaning GDP growth. And by no coincidence at all, these are all economies that have tried a Keynesian expenditure program to end recession. The thing that is most astonishing is that there is virtually no economist of the mainstream who could even explain it. And as the article points out, this is even happening as the price of oil has plummeted.

Here’s a clue about what’s wrong with modern theory. Our economies are not saving too much. Our economies are being plundered of their savings by our governments who are wasting our resources on projects that will never bring a positive return. Go back to the stimulus packages and other government-directed expenditures of 5-6 years ago – some of which were even ludicrously described as infrastructure investment. What you are seeing today is the absence of the private sector projects that were forestalled back then. We are ruining our economies, and the economics profession is at the heart of the problem. Aggregate demand does not make an economy grow. Economies only grow if there is value adding investment. Seems obvious. Why don’t economists get it?

Waffle Street the movie is coming

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Waffle Street the book is a true life adventure in which the author learns about the meaning of Say’s Law by going from an investment house to working the night shift at a Waffle House. Waffle Street the movie is now about to be released which, as it says, is based on a true story along the lines, no doubt, of what is found in the book. I have been following both book and movie from the start, and while I cannot take even an ounce of credit for any of it, I have to admit there is a very great pleasure in being able to tell you that my Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution is sitting on Jimmy’s desk in the final scene, right beneath a copy of Jean-Baptiste Say’s Treatise on Political Economy. To understand why you will probably have to read the book, which along with a great story will explain to you the meaning and significance of Say’s Law. But for a movie in the true Hollywood style, you should see the film as well when it comes out. How extraordinary it must also be for Jimmy Adams to find that being fired from his job in finance led to his ending up writing a book that was turned into a movie with Jimmy himself played by James Lafferty!

UPDATE: I’ve just had a look at the interview with Jimmy linked at the start. A good question from the interviewer, which led to this reply drenched in the logic of Say’s Law:

Too often, white-collar financial service workers forget that any given good or service can only be obtained by 1) producing it yourself or 2) by creating something of value which can be exchanged for it. Instead, we’re prone to think the major impediments to our individual and collective prosperity can be readily removed by tweaking interest rates, the tax code, or deficit spending.

My restaurant co-workers, in contrast, were under no such delusions. With the exception of the manager, I was the only person working third shift who hadn’t spent considerable time in a state or federal correctional facility. Most of them were extremely grateful for the opportunity to perform honest work at a market wage, and took a very proactive, customer-service-oriented approach to their financial lives after parole. Generally speaking, they were great examples to me. In the book, I use a number of my interactions with them as commonsense illustrations of economic principles. I really intended the narrative to be wholly humorous self-deprecation, but I had so many financial epiphanies on the job that I couldn’t help but share them with my readers.

A brief history of Say’s Law – which was not invented by Say

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I have just done an interview for a podcast with Tom Woods on my first book, Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution which has as its subtitle, How Economic Theory Lost its Way. Some reflections on the interview about what is not well understood about Say’s Law. I will, of course, put the podcast up online when it is broadcast next week. Here are some reflections on that interview.

First, although it was called “Say’s” Law, the name was only given in the 1920s. Say had his law of markets (loi des débouchés), but this was that goods buy goods. Everyone knew that, going back to at least Adam Smith and probably well before. The relevant sequence of events to understand this issue is this:

1803 – Say publishes his Treatise in which he points out that goods buy goods which he did in trying to explain why recessions are not caused by a lack of money.

1808 – James Mill replies to William Spence who had argued that demand is the core necessity in creating employment and economic activity. Mill in his comprehensive reply, emphasises the impossibility of demand deficiency as a cause of recession and unemployment, but picks up Say’s point about goods buying goods.

1813 – Say publishes the second edition of his Treatise in which he re-writes his entire chapter on the law of markets to pick up James Mill’s point that demand deficiency does not cause recession – but gets it wrong by arguing that if Good A doesn’t sell then more of Good B needs to be produced to create an increased demand for Good A. No one thinks of it this way.

1820 – Malthus publishes his Principles in which he argues that recessions and unemployment are caused by general gluts (demand deficiency)

1820s – General Glut debate – virtually the entire mainstream comes to the conclusion that general gluts are never a realistic possibility – but the policy conclusion is that if Good A doesn’t sell, it should stop being produced. Say never gets it and continues to the end with his version that more of other goods (Good B) is the solution

1848 – John Stuart Mill’s Principles is published in which the full explanation of Say’s Law properly understood is found. It becomes the universal position of mainstream economics through until 1936. The conclusion universally held was that demand deficiency never causes recessions and increased demand will not lower unemployment. Only those on the left, especially amongst the followers of Marx, argued on the other side.

1921 – Fred Taylor publishes his Principles text in which he discusses demand deficiency and also notes that although a crucial point, the argument contra demand deficiency has never before been given a name and is therefore often overlooked. He gives it one: Say’s Law.

1920s – By giving this principle a name, it becomes the focus of much criticism but only on the American side of the Atlantic.

1936 – Keynes publishes his General Theory in which he attacks Say’s Law. He defines Say’s Law as “supply creates its own demand”, as close to a meaningless phrase as it is possible to find. But there is no doubt he is really in every way attacking the underlying principle, which he very accurately understands. He explains exactly what he is getting at on page 32 in the para which begins, “The idea we can safely neglect the aggregate demand function . . .”.

The idea that we can safely neglect the aggregate demand function is fundamental to the Ricardian economics, which underlie what we have been taught for more than a century. Malthus, indeed, had vehemently opposed Ricardo’s doctrine that it was impossible for effective demand to be deficient; but vainly. For, since Malthus was unable to explain clearly (apart from an appeal to the facts of common observation) how and why effective demand could be deficient or excessive, he failed to furnish an alternative construction; and Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain. Not only was his theory accepted by the city, by statesmen and by the academic world. But controversy ceased; the other point of view completely disappeared; it ceased to be discussed. The great puzzle of Effective Demand with which Malthus had wrestled vanished from economic literature. You will not find it mentioned even once in the whole works of Marshall, Edgeworth and Professor Pigou, from whose hands the classical theory has received its most mature embodiment. It could only live on furtively, below the surface, in the underworlds of Karl Marx, Silvio Gesell or Major Douglas.

[As an additional note, the question I like to ask all my Keynesian friends is where did Keynes get the phrase “Say’s Law” from since he never mentions anyone else from whom he took so much as a single idea. I wrote an entire paper on Keynes’s plagiarism which was rife.]

Second, the most complete statement of the demand deficiency side of Say’s Law was produced by John Stuart Mill in 1848. The Liberty Fund just last month ran a series of papers on The Economics of John Stuart Mill for which my paper was the lead article. As I note in one of these articles [#16], Mill’s specific statements on these principles, which did not have a name in his own time, is scattered around his Principles of Political Economy. But in classical times these were the hardest of hard principles, an absolute bedrock and foundation for economic thinking. These were the conclusions:

1. recessions do occur and when they do the effect on the labor market is prolonged and devastating;

2. recessions are not caused by oversaving and demand deficiency;

3. recessions cannot be brought to an end by trying to increase aggregate demand.

After the marginal revolution of the 1870s, while these conclusions remained in place, economics shifted to the demand side (marginal utility) and the theory of the cycle almost went into hibernation. By the time Keynes writes the General Theory, virtually all of the anti-bodies against demand deficiency as a cause of recession had disappeared from amongst economists, especially those under forty. The conclusions of the General Glut debate had been washed completely away.

Alas, it does get me down that there is so much of this story that no one knows. If we are going to finally reverse the Keynesian Revolution and its poisonous policy prescriptions, we are going to have to reverse the notion of demand deficiency which Keynes introduced into economic theory. There is no issue more important than Say’s Law if we are going to get macro principles and policy right, but as I have found, it is almost impossible to get these things right because of the way the issue has developed over the years. In my view, you have to understand both the principle and its history to see the point given all the mystification that has entered into it over the past 200 years.

Even more on Say’s Law and Austrian economics

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The debate on the Coordination Problem website continues but see here and here for the prior discussion. The following three posts have just been put up.

Hayek detailed the influence of classical political economists on his theory of the business cycle. See the 1st chapter of Prices and Production. Many predecessors are mentioned, just not Say.

In Economics as a Coordination Problem, I suggest that Say is relevant. But it is Say’s theory of the entrepreneur that is relevant.
Posted by: Jerry O’Driscoll | July 18, 2015 at 08:35 PM

James Mill did not use the term “Say’s Law,” preferring the “Law of Markets,” but he and Say corresponded and they each cited the other in their works.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser | July 18, 2015 at 11:17 PM

In the WN, Adam Smith argued that “parsimony” was the immediate cause of “the increase of capital.” That is an ex ante version of what came to be known as Say’s Law.
“What is annually saved is as regularly consumed as what is annually spent, and nearly in the same time too.” In other words, the supply of savings constitutes the demand for investment.
Even earlier, there are statements by the Physiocrat, Mercier de la Rivière, that anticipate Say’s Law. And so on.
Posted by: Jerry O’Driscoll | July 18, 2015 at 11:55 PM

Again it is Barkley Rosser who sticks to the issues to whom I focus my reply.

It is not a little odd to be instructed by Barkley Rosser that James Mill and J.B. Say corresponded and cited each other’s works. I have written one book, many articles, and brought together two collections of writings on Say’s Law, including a five volume set on everything written on Say’s Law through until the year 2000. Of course James Mill didn’t use the term “Say’s Law”. The phrase wasn’t even invented until the twentieth century. That he discussed “le loi des débouchés” (the law of markets) is different since that is the name he applied himself. That still doesn’t answer where Keynes came up with the term Say’s Law since that is from F.M.Taylor (1921). Those who think they know the story of how Keynes went from the Treatise (1930) to The General Theory (1936) typically ignore this very inconvenient fact.

Say’s Law does not mean “goods buy goods”. What Say’s Law means is that demand deficiency (overproduction) does not cause recessions and therefore a demand stimulus is never the remedy. Everyone once knew that goods bought goods – see the second paragraph of the introduction to Book II of The Wealth of Nations where it is spelt out with perfect clarity.

For an indubitably Austrian perspective on Say’s Law, let me then direct you to Murray Rothbard in an article specifically titled “Say’s Law of Markets”. It is mostly right but Rothbard is unfortunately caught up in the trap of thinking that Say’s Law was originated by Say, or worse, that Say explains it properly. But here he is absolutely on the money as he is on most of the rest in his article:

“Essentially Say’s law is a stern and proper response to the various economic ignoramuses as well as self-seekers who, in every economic recession or crisis, begin to complain loudly about the terrible problem of general ‘overproduction’ or, in the common language of Say’s day, a ‘general glut’ of goods on the market.”

And please take note of the technical term he uses, “economic ignoramuses”. I understand the exasperation, especially in the face of yet another massive failure of policy in the various Keynesian stimulus packages that followed the GFC.

That no one gets it is as normal, but perhaps, by pulling Murray Rothbard into the mix, there might be some recognition that Say’s Law has a legitimate Austrian pedigree.

More on Say’s Law and Austrian economics

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The conversation on Say’s Law continues at The Coordination Problem website. These were posted following my own post yesterday. Neither of the posts are anything other than assertions with no actual text references, but they do raise issues that are raised all the time. But the second, from Barkley Rosser, gets into the issues that truly matter.

Actually, Hayek viewed Say’s Law as an equilibrium concept. He argued it did not hold in a monetary economy because money allows there to be demand without supply. One could say the denial of Say’s Law in a monetary economy undergirds Hayek’s monetary theory of economic fluctuations.

It is not clear that the Law originated with Say. It already appears in the Wealth of Nations.

Then there is the question of whether Say changed his mind. In the fifth edition of the Treatise, never translated, Thomas Sowell argues that Say changed his mind about the Law.

Finally, Mill’s Fourth Fundamental Proposition Respecting Capital is at the heart of Hayek’s cycle theory. Hayek clarifies that in an Appendix to The Pure Theory of Capital. And I analyzed its relevance in Economics as a Coordination Problem. It is not a forgotten concept.

Posted by: Jerry O’Driscoll | July 18, 2015 at 02:43 PM

The quote that Kates provides from Mises is peculiar. It is clearly a criticism of Keynes, but aside from declaring that Keynes failed to disprove Say’s Law, he really provides no defense of it or how it fits into Austrian economics.

I am interested to see that Steve Horwitz basically that the main Austrians said very little about it, and one has to go such figures as Hutt to find much, with followups by Steve himself and some others.

I think Jerry is right that Hayek probably did not accept it in a monetary economy.

Mill took it very seriously and spent much time talking about it and relying on it in his arguments.

Regarding Say himself, he may have changed his mind on it, but from the very beginning he always recognized that it did not universally hold and gave various examples of how and when it might not hold, most of these involving people hoarding money for some reason or other, such as in the Ottoman Empire not to have to spend more on taxes if one engaged in conspicuous consumption, although one can find numerous quotes from him in various places where he certainly states some version of it. As it is, I think it was James Mill who coined the term and promoted it in the English literature, thus making it not too surprising that his son would also be an advocate of it, although I may be mistaken on this last point (and I accept that versions of it may well have been around earlier).

Posted by: Barkley Rosser | July 18, 2015 at 05:31 PM

Understanding Say’s Law may be as difficult an issue as it is possible to find in a world where every economist is taught Keynesian aggregate demand as their first approach to thinking about the nature of recession. Say’s Law is the essence of supply side economics. At the aggregate level, demand has absolutely no role to play. What demand there is originates with supply and can come from no other source. Public spending unbacked by real production is no more a stimulus than the printing of counterfeit money. I have therefore put up the following post:

The fact that this fundamental principle of pre-Keynesian economic theory is named “Say’s” Law has been one of the more damaging aspects of both the history of economics and of economic theory itself. Here is something to contemplate about the true origins of the Keynesian Revolution. The term “Say’s Law” was invented by Fred Manville Taylor and entered into common usage on the American side of the Atlantic in the 1920’s with the publication of Taylor’s Principles of Economics. How, it may be asked, did the term get into The General Theory? Say himself never understood Say’s Law properly. If you do want to understand it properly you need to go to John Stuart Mill and those among the classical school who followed after. J.E. Cairnes is the most accessible source.

Say’s Law states that you can never make an economy grow from the demand side. Mill’s version is a direct refutation of Keynesian economics: “demand for commodities is not demand for labour”. Mill and the classics said you could not make an economy grow by increased expenditure; Keynes said you could. All modern macro continues to argue that it can be done and is to that extent entirely Keynesian. That there is no real world evidence that increases in aggregate demand lead to increases in output and employment confirms in every instance a stimulus has been applied that Say’s Law is valid. If you would like to see my explanation in short form, you have my articles at the Liberty Fund to go to. If you would like to see the longer and more extended version, you could try the second edition of my Free Market Economics. I will just leave you with Ricardo’s reply to Malthus in the midst of the general glut debate (the first attempt to introduce “Keynesian” economics during the 1820s): “men err in their productions, there is no deficiency of demand”. This is the classical and Austrian theory of recession. There has been a disorganisation of markets that has led to recession and unemployment (that is, men have erred in their productions). The problem is not over-saving and a lack of aggregate demand.

Will anyone get it? It is such a frustration.

Keynesian policy in the United States

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july 4 washington

In Washington, and went to the Mall last night for the fireworks. The best fireworks display I have ever seen, the sky was at the end entirely covered with colour and sound. They were even able to send up in the middle of it a set of rockets that, when they burst, spelled out “USA”. But the very few chants of “USA” also died away as quickly as the fireworks. There’s too much reality around at the moment.

As to reality, there is, of course, this:

Even after another month of strong hiring in June and a sinking unemployment rate, the U.S. job market just isn’t what it used to be.

Pay is sluggish. Many part-timers can’t find full-time work. And a diminished share of Americans either have a job or are looking for one.

The rest of the article is fumbling idiocy as the journalist tries to explain away the actual reality of the American labour market. You need to contrast this great Keynesian disaster with the last time a classical policy was applied in the US.

Beginning in January 1920, something much worse than a recession blighted the world. The U.S. suffered the steepest plunge in wholesale prices in its history (not even eclipsed by the Great Depression), as well as a 31.6% drop in industrial production and a 46.6% fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Unemployment spiked, and corporate profits plunged.

What to do? “Nothing” was the substantive response of the successive administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding. Well, not quite nothing. Rather, they did what few 21st-century policy makers would have dared: They balanced the federal budget and—via the still wet-behind-the-ears Federal Reserve—raised interest rates rather than lowering them. Curiously, the depression ran its course. Eighteen months elapsed from business-cycle peak to business-cycle trough—following which the 1920s roared.

At the end of my Say’s Law presentation to the Keynesian symposium I attended at Dartmouth I was asked to explain why a classical policy works, which it does. And the fact is, the presuppositions are so different that it is almost impossible to latch onto the differences. If these things interest you – and I am all too aware how few actually, really are – go to my lead article at the Liberty Fund and carefully read the section that deals with the diagram I have there. There you will find macroeconomics before Keynes summarised in less than 1000 words. This is the theory that sat under the policies of the early 1920s. Hoover, and then Roosevelt in spades, a decade later would introduce “Keynesian” policies, the first of many such failures in a policy that has never had a success.

Adam Smith on Say’s Law

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The actual mechanism of exchange that is often mistaken for Say’s Law is the statement that demand is constituted by supply. Purchases are made with the money one has received from producing and selling. How odd that I had never noticed this in Adam Smith before where he writes exactly that. This is from the Introduction to Book II, “On the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock”:

When the division of labour has once been thoroughly introduced, the produce of a man’s own labour can supply but a very small part of his occasional wants. The far greater part of them are supplied by the produce of other men’s labour, which he purchases with the produce, or, what is the same thing, with the price of the produce of his own. But this purchase cannot be made till such time as the produce of his own labour has not only been completed, but sold.

Ah those two words, “but sold”. It’s not enough to produce something. Whatever one has produced must be then be converted into money before one can then buy something else: C-M-C’.

Smith also goes further in that same intro by discussing the role of the entrepreneur in finding value adding forms of work for employees who could not do so on their own. This is where Keynesian economics breaks down in the belief that a community can spend its money before it is earned. Perhaps an individual can, but not everyone together. In the passage below, the stock held by the employer would today basically consist of those lines of credit that allow employers to pay their workers before the goods they are producing find buyers. That stock must exist if individuals are to receive the goods they then purchase with their wages:

As the accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying on this great improvement in the productive powers of labour, so that accumulation naturally leads to this improvement. The person who employs his stock in maintaining labour, necessarily wishes to employ it in such a manner as to produce as great a quantity of work as possible. He endeavours, therefore, both to make among his workmen the most proper distribution of employment, and to furnish them with the best machines which he can either invent or afford to purchase. His abilities in both these respects are generally in proportion to the extent of his stock, or to the number of people whom it can employ. The quantity of industry, therefore, not only increases in every country with the increase of the stock which employs it, but, in consequence of that increase, the same quantity of industry produces a much greater quantity of work.

How much does any of this penetrate the conscious awareness of an economist today?

What in economics is known as Say’s Law

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There I was just yesterday quoting Kevin Williamson in discussing Economics is quite simple and straightforward when today I find that he has now gone all the way and invoked Say’s Law.

Dollars have value because of the things for which we can trade them: Picasso paintings (or, ideally, paintings by some superior artist), coffee, cotton, cheeseburgers, sofa beds . . . checks, chickens, or pesos. This is an aspect of what in economics is known as Say’s Law, which holds that goods are paid for in goods — i.e., that we manufacture widgets or grow tomatoes or write novels because we wish to consume shoes and poached salmon and Buicks. The dollar or the euro is just a way to avoid the difficulties of trading a truckload of chickens (or a convoy of them) for Les Femmes d’Alger.

Say’s Law really wouldn’t be adding much of a point at all if the only thing it said was that spending is based on selling. What makes it important in a world of Keynesian economics is that it points out that demand which is not based on having produced and sold, ultimately leads to a fall in output and employment. Where spending is greater than available supply, the economy finds there are more than 100 units of output being bought for ever 100 units of output having been produced. It takes a while for the problems to show up, but eventually they must. When those down the expenditure track try to spend the dollars they receive, they find they cannot buy as much as they thought they would. Some firms therefore cannot pay all their bills and the economy slips a bit further back. The wheels of the economy do not mesh, but given the way we teach macro, hardly one in a million can understand why. Indeed, the worse our economies perform, it is often the very businesses being cheated by these deficits which ask governments for even more of the same to get them out of the problems that the first set of deficits had caused.

Modern economics is based on the fallacy that demand can be manufactured before there is production to match the spending. You can see that such policies do not work by the dismal state of those economies which tried deficit spending to generate growth. You just cannot find these policy failures explained in any of our economics texts, other than, of course, my own.

[My thanks to Dimitri for sending the link along.]

A query on Keynesian economics

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I have received a brief email from one of my students:

Dear Dr Kates,

First let me thank you for the emails guiding us through the course.

On a personal note, I am curious as to how and why you believe that we should beware of the Keynesian approach (theories that we all have been taught at some point). Is there a book or some articles I could read to in order to understand why the pre-Keynesian era is more relevant to our current economy?

Thank you.

Kind regards

This I can tell you is not an every-day occurrence in the life of an academic. I have now replied:

You don’t know how much you have gladdened my heart in writing to me with your query. As I try to emphasise, I do not ask anyone in an introductory course to choose which side is right and I teach both. You have no doubt which side I think is valid, but I also teach Keynesian economics as accurately as anyone I know, all the more so since I understand it so well since I have studied it for so long. Nevertheless, you may be in the only classroom in the world that is taught the other side as comprehensively as you will find in this course.

But you ask where you might find some literature on the non-Keynesian classical side. I have, as it happens, just completed an 1800-page, two volume collection of every article critical of Keynesian economics written since the publication of The General Theory in 1936. But if you are looking for what I think of as the best criticism available, the best I can offer are two articles I wrote myself, the first one written at the end of 2008 and published at the beginning of 2009 just as the various stimulus packages were getting under way. The second was a five-year review of the first article written in 2014.

This is what was published in 2009 under the title, “The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics”.

This is what was published five years later under the title: “Keynesian Economics’ Dangerous Return – Five Years On”.

Both somewhat long, but both are straight to the point and were written so they could be understood without an economics training. Given how things are going, I am not anticipating much improvement on things when I come to write the ten-year review in 2019.

Again, I thank you for your query and I hope these articles will provide you with the insight into the material you are being taught. And, let me remind you, there is also the course text which covers these same issues in greater theoretical depth.

With kind regards.