22 Facts About Jean-Baptiste Say

1.

Jean-Baptiste Say was a liberal French economist and businessman who argued in favor of competition, free trade and lifting restraints on business.

2.

Jean-Baptiste Say's father Jean-Etienne Say was born to a Protestant family which had moved from Nimes to Geneva for some time in consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

3.

Jean-Baptiste Say was intended to follow a commercial career and in 1785 was sent with his brother Horace to complete his education in England.

4.

Jean-Baptiste Say lodged for a time in Croydon and afterwards in Fulham.

5.

Jean-Baptiste Say returned to Paris, where he found employment in the office of a life assurance company directed by Etienne Claviere.

6.

Jean-Baptiste Say's first literary attempt was a pamphlet on the liberty of the press, published in 1789.

7.

Jean-Baptiste Say later worked under Mirabeau on the Courrier de Provence.

8.

Jean-Baptiste Say had by this time established his reputation as a publicist and when the consular government was established in 1799 he was selected as one of the 100 members of the Tribunat, resigning the editorship of the Decade.

9.

Jean-Baptiste Say devoted his leisure time to revising his economic treatise which had been out of print for some time, but the system of state censorship in place prevented him from republishing it.

10.

In 1814, Jean-Baptiste Say availed himself of the relative liberty arising from the entrance of the allied powers into France to bring out a second edition of the work dedicated to the emperor Alexander I of Russia, who had professed himself his pupil.

11.

Jean-Baptiste Say is well known for Jean-Baptiste Say's law, or the law of markets, often controversially summarised as:.

12.

Jean-Baptiste Say wrote that it is not the abundance of money, but the abundance of other products in general that facilitates sales:.

13.

Jean-Baptiste Say's law has been considered by John Kenneth Galbraith as "the most distinguished example of the stability of economic ideas, including when they are wrong".

14.

Jean-Baptiste Say's law emerged during the early period of the Industrial Revolution, at a time when the economic phenomena of increased output merged with England's cyclical inability to maintain both sales and unemployment.

15.

Besides studying large-scale entrepreneurs, Jean-Baptiste Say looked at people working for themselves:.

16.

Jean-Baptiste Say thought about which qualities are essential for successful entrepreneurs and highlighted the quality of judgement.

17.

Jean-Baptiste Say did so by making a distinction between the enterprise function and the supply-of-capital-function which allowed him to look at the earnings of the entrepreneur on the one hand and the remuneration of capital on the other hand.

18.

Jean-Baptiste Say touched upon risk and uncertainty as well as innovation when discussing entrepreneurship, although he never deeply investigated their relationships.

19.

In 1793, Jean-Baptiste Say married Mlle Deloche, daughter of a former lawyer.

20.

In 1826, Jean-Baptiste Say was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

21.

Jean-Baptiste Say lost his wife in January 1830 and from that time his health declined.

22.

Jean-Baptiste Say died in Paris on 15 November 1832 and was buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery.