Concept

Supply creates its own demand

Overview

"Supply creates its own demand" is a formulation of Say's law. The rejection of this doctrine is a central component of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) and a central tenet of Keynesian economics. See Principle of effective demand, which is an affirmative form of the negation of Say's law.

Keynes's rejection of Say's law has on the whole been accepted within mainstream economics since the 1940s and 1950s in the neoclassical synthesis, but debate continues between Keynesian economists and neoclassical economists (see saltwater and freshwater economics).

Keynes's interpretation is rejected by many economists as a misinterpretation or caricature of Say's law — see Say's law: Keynes vs. Say — and the advocacy of the phrase "supply creates its own demand" is today most associated with supply-side economics, which retorts that "Keynes turned Say on his head and instead stated that 'demand creates its own supply'".

The exact phrase "supply creates its own demand" does not appear to be found in the writings of classical economists; similar sentiments, though different wordings, appear in the work of John Stuart Mill (1848), whom Keynes credits and quotes, and his father, James Mill (1808), whom Keynes does not. See for more detailed information Kates (1998) Say's Law and the Keynesian Revolution: How Macroeconomic Theory Lost its Way..

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Of this nature is the fallacy in what is called, by Adam Smith and others, the Mercantile Theory in Political Economy. That theory sets out from the common maxim, that whatever brings in money enriches; or that every one is rich in proportion to the quantity of money he obtains. From this it is concluded that the value of any branch of trade, or of the trade of the country altogether, consists in the balance of…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
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We are now qualified to define the exact nature of the benefit which a producer or dealer derives from the acquisition of a new customer. It is as follows:-- 1. If any part of his own capital was locked up in the form of unsold goods, producing (for a longer period or a shorter) nothing at all; a portion of this is called into greater activity, and becomes more constantly productive. But to this we must add some…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
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This postulate is called the “principle of limitation of variety”. Mr. Keynes again finds that it is needed in attempts to establish laws by statistics; if he is right, it is needed for all our scientific knowledge outside pure mathematics. Jean Nicod pointed out that it is not quite sufficiently stringent. We need, according to Mr.
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Liberalism.

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