Jean-Baptiste Say on the Effects of Production on Population

Abstract

Jean-Baptiste Say had a varied career in business government journalism and academia and became the most prominent French economist of the early 19th century. His major work known as the deconomie politique was published in 1803 and was widely used as a textbook. He is remembered mainly for Says Law: supply creates its own demand. As fears mounted that the industrial revolution would cause a general glut of commodities and manufactures this law effectively discounted the notion on the basis that increasing production tends to comparably increase purchasing power. Say also argues an analogous proposition in the demographic sphere to the extent that population growth will correspond with the available means of subsistence. Although intriguing this argument rests upon an assumed limited probability that per capita level of consumption will increase. With asides pointing to his central thesis Say addresses the ineffectuality of pronatalist incentives in the face of individual interest; the distinction between high and low mortality regimes delivering the same population growth; the essence of a life-cycle model of human capital; the identification of good government with less frequent interference by public authority; and the diseconomies of scale in overgrown cities manifested in an aggregate of little inconveniences. Chapter 11 of book 2 of Charles-Robert Prinseps 1821 English translation of the Traite is presented in full in this paper albeit without the translators footnotes.