Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) · CatalogJean-Baptiste SayJean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) · CatalogFrench economist who systematized Adam Smith's ideas and formulated the law of markets.
Author
Jean-Baptiste Say
1767-1832 · French economist who systematized Adam Smith's ideas and formulated the law of markets
Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) was born in Lyon to a Protestant merchant family and trained in commerce, partly in England. He read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations while working for an insurance company and from 1794 edited the journal La Décade philosophique. Appointed to Napoleon's Tribunate in 1799, he was removed in 1804 after refusing to alter his Treatise to support the regime's policies, and ran a cotton-spinning business for several years. After 1815 he taught economics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and, from 1831, at the Collège de France. He died in Paris in 1832.
A Treatise on Political Economy is Jean-Baptiste Say's systematic account of how wealth is produced, distributed and consumed. It first appeared in Paris in 1803, under the Consulate, and Say revised it through five French editions in his lifetime.