J. B. Say argued that commercial crises were the results of effective demand failures, except, unlike Malthus he did not naively attribute effective demand failures to overproduction given some absolute limit on people's willingness to consume. Instead, Say built a theory of recessions based on...

The meaning of Say's Law may seem an issue of little relevance to economists today. It would seem, on the face of it, of interest only to historians of economics. Whatever Say's Law might mean, the one thing we economists know, or at least think we know, is that it was comprehensively refuted by...