Talk:Say's law

message: It notes that J.B. Say was not actually the creator of the law, but only mentions that it had come about earlier. Perhaps the actual origin (or as much information as possible) would be a good addition  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.105.149.62 (talk) 20:25, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Opinions differ on who created Say's law. Leading contenders include Adam Smith, Say, and James Mill. See the Thweat citation for more information on this issue. Thiesen (talk) 23:18, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Origin?

message: Agree with him or not, here is economist Steven Kates on Say's law:   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.210.109.66 (talk) 00:41, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Say's Law & Business Cycles

message: Say lived in 1767-1832, that is, quite some time ago. The article on Say's law mostly discusses modern interpretation and usage of Says law and modern opposition to it. What I'd find interesting is more information about how Say himself and people of his time thought about Say's law. --EnSamulili 11:33, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your comment. I think I have addressed this issue. See "early opinions." Thiesen (talk) 20:48, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: modern interpretation

message: I have now made some major edits to the article. A few points about them:
#My information comes from a book by Steven Kates called "Say's Law And the Keynesian Revolution - How Macroeconomic Theory Lost Its Way". I mentioned it above as the book which is "about Say's law: what he said, why he said it, how it was interpreted by his contemporaries, how it was intpreted by Keynes and how it is interpreted by modern liberals (laissez-faireists)."
#The current version may have some inconsistencies between what I have contributed and what other have contributed. This is because I'm still in the midway of the book and I can't say that I master the modern interpretations.
#For the time being I left the passages about money hoarding untouched. Hoarding of money was known to eg. Mill and, IMHO, the article at the moment speaks almost entirely for Keynes' interpretation of Say's law (which I find POV).
#I did a dirty trick and inserted a "modern (?)" (sic!) in the article. I inserted a contradicting example to show that pre-Keynesian proponents of Say's law in general were not against government intervention. Since someone had added the earlier statement, I suppose they know that some modern proponents might oppose government intervention. --EnSamulili 10:34, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: major edits

message: I removed this paragraph:
:"This view is a version of the common assumption in conservative orthodox macroeconomics that money is "neutral", a "veil" that has no effect on the economy besides determining the average price level."
I don't think this fit in the place it was put, but I will later write a chapter on money according to Say's law and reuse the paragraph there. --EnSamulili 18:25, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. EnSamulili 17:46, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  On money 

message: :Say's answer is simple: there is no reason to engage in hoarding. To quote Say from above:
::"Nor is [an individual] less anxious to dispose of the money he may get ... But the only way of getting rid of money is in the purchase of some product or other."
:The only reason to have money, in Say's view, is to buy products. It would not be a mistake, in his view, to treat the economy as if it were a barter economy.
I think it's a bit misleading to say that Say had an answer - he (or anyone else) probably was never asked the question! EnSamulili 22:55, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Say's answer

message: This section is puzzling as there are many modern interpretations. The section seems to deal with Keynes' interpretation, so I think I will combine this section with "Keynes vs. Say" --EnSamulili 17:37, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Modern interpretations

message: I created a subtitle with the same name as the page. Besides the chapters on recession and money, I intend to write about the difficulty of defining Say's law under this new title (and place it before chapter "recession and unemployment"). EnSamulili 17:46, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Subtitle "Say's law"

message: :However, in Classical economics, there was no reason for such a collapse to persist. Persistent depressions, such as that of the 1930s, were impossible in a laissez-faire world. The flexibility of markets under laissez faire would allow prices, wages, and interest rates to adjust to abolish all excess supplies and demands.
What does persist mean in this case? For eternity? Classical economists lived through many depressions, so they should know that depression may last long. EnSamulili 22:55, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Persisting collapse

message: I'm inclined to make an edit or two, particularly to this phrase:
:Many advocates of laissez-faire economics (for example, economists at the International Monetary Fund) are quite activist in their approach, advocating the use of state power to destroy unions, minimum wage laws, and the like in order to make labor markets more "flexible" so that this idealized vision of labor markets can be attained.
:But I figured I'd bring it to the discussion page first. In what sense can the IMF be called "laissez-faire"? They're explicitly interventionist -- the sentence actually contradicts itself on this point. Does anyone have a compelling reason to leave it as-is? Eric.d.dixon 03:13, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't think that the IMF advocates laissez-faire economics. Austerity programs that the IMF have promoted heavily in the past entail tax increases. I am happy for you to edit the sentence. Terjepetersen 05:33, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  It is true that it isn't totally accurate to decribe the IMF as laissez-faire.  Neo-liberal would be a better description, but this isn't a purely economic philosophy. --OneWorld22 08:23, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm removing the paragraph entirely because it is NPOV, has a failed citation (IMF is NOT laizzez-faire), and contradicts itself by stating economists are activist in their approach by advocating the removing of minimum wage laws "and the like".  This is, by definition, a non-interventionist approach, and therefore they are NOT activist.  Someone who wrote this was very confused. David Samra 14:51, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

text: The article could be improved since it comes out of nowhere with the hording concept.  I had to read it twice to understand where that was coming from.  Hording should be seperated into two categories: A) Where money is a commodity (e.g., gold, silver, salt, etc.) in which case so-called "hording" is really use of the underlying commodity (such as Roman soldiers using the salt given on their food instead of trading it).  The second situation would be under fiat money where money has no real use except for wiping your backside or trading it for something of use.  Furthermore, lumping all non-Keynesian economists under "classical" is misleading.  Milton Friedman "classical" is quite different from Austrian School "classical" and not making this clear can be confusing to a reader who isn't already familiar with the topic and the ramifications thereof.200.60.249.217 (talk) 14:28, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Laissez Faire?

message: All Say is trying to point out is that the amount of things sold is, of course, the same amount as things bought. So if people want to buy more things, they will have to sell more to pay for those. If they sell less, inevitably they can buy less. That's all people! Nothing mysterious going on here. Any 6 year old could come up with this theory now, but many kudos for a man stating the obvious 2 centuries ago. Unfortunately the article does not explain Say's law at all. It tries to confuse the reader by explaining why people like Keynes think that this fundamental law could somehow be avoided and it even links to Supply creates its own demand. That would be a perfect example to show that Keynes was an extreme lunatic but Keynes' insanity has no place in this article until at least the law itself is explained to the reader. Which the article currently doesn't.  Joepnl (talk) 01:26, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is Say's Law not in an article called Say's Law? 

message: Holy hell, look at this opening paragraph. It's a giant screed against (what the author considers to be) common misinterpretations of Say's Law, with special emphasis on Keynes. What gives? Not only does it look like a big ol' NPOV violation, but as JoePNL points out, it doesn't even tell us what Say's Law is!
Would somebody with an Econ 101 textbook handy care to provide a textbook definition and citation to replace this thing?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.59.53.171 (talk) 22:22, 25 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I have attempted to address some of these problems.  More work needs to be done.Rick Norwood (talk) 13:55, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening Paragraph Insanity 

message: "Economists such as Thomas Sowell (who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the idea) of the Chicago School have advocated Say's law."
Just plain wrong. Sowell documents very clearly why Say's Law DOESN'T always hold, both in his book _Say's Law_ and his more recent book on classical economics. GeneCallahan (talk) 22:09, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Then you should change it, good sir... unless the claim is well cited in the article.--Dark Charles 22:46, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

text: I went ahead and deleted it myself. Problem fixed:)--Dark Charles 22:49, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sowell on Say's Law 

message: This entire article is pretty much what Keynes has to say about Say's law; very little of the actual article is about Say's law. HUGE NPOV violation imo; references to Keynes should be limited to a criticism section, and that section should be small and basically redirect to keynesian economic theory. Nodrogj (talk) 23:09, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re-write necessary 

message: In the following passage of the article : 
"In Say's language, "products are paid for with products" (1803: p. 153) or "a glut can take place only when there are too many means of production applied to one kind of product and not enough to another" (1803: p. 178-9). or "the supply creates its own demand" Explaining his point at length, he wrote that"
The last part ("the supply creates its own demand") seems to be incorrect, according to the french version of this article, and should attributed to Keyne's critique of Say, as a caricature of his thought, not to Say himself. On the one hand, there is no source for this statement, and on the other hand, the citation that follows does not include such statement. Thus the statement should be removed.
So, taking matters in my own hands, I edited this part out : or "the supply creates its own demand", which was included in the second sentence of the first paragraph of this section...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.100.143.47 (talk) 04:10, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Say's formulation 

message: This article is a mess, it looks like a running debate between a number of people. Probably could also lose a quarter of the current length. Frohike14 (talk) 04:19, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  A mess 

message: There are lots of sections in this article that have either no citations or only a few citations. Can someone knowledgeable about this topic please put sources in the article? CrypticIndividual1000 (talk) 18:08, 11 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations