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This collection of the views of excellent scholars from a number of schools of economic thought makes an outstanding contribution to the development of economic thought. I recommend it not merely for the excellent attempt at fairly judging Jean-Baptiste Say's real statements that came to be regarded, and are still regarded by scholars familiar with Say's actual work, as indisputable economic law, but for the insight it provides into the thought processes of several schools of economic thought. The work is very interesting and informative!

It really isn't fair that a distorted version of a great economist's words should become the straw man for oversimplified economic attack. It should also be born in mind that there are numerous schools of economic thought and one should not disparage other views if one has not considered them. These are two causes that this excellent volume of multiple perspectives seeks to champion. Say's "law," first dubbed so by James Mill in approximately 1806, simply makes the point that our "demand" for anything is the "supply" we produce, whether products or services. Money is merely a medium of exchange and not an end in itself.
What people want in life, whether in a depression or a boom time, is food, shelter, clothing and entertainment, among other things, not piles of money. Money does no good if there is nothing to exchange it for. So the problem in a depression is profitable "production" or "supply" and not a greater supply of exchange medium, or even "work" in and of itself: what is needed is profitable production and efficient distribution of that produce to others who are similarly producing something desired, "needed." Keynesianism (and Keynesians are included in this book), which dominated the middle part of this century's economic thinking, has clouded this issue with complicated mathematical gymnastics purporting to have produced gold from lead--I speak allegorically--when the truth is this cannot be done. When any system purports to have overthrown something as simple and straightforward as the idea that what one produces is what one has to demand other economic goods, unless one resorts to theft and/or violence (which is not technically demand), then that system has made some mistakes in the translation of the realities of everyday life into the inputs of that system, which for Keynes followers is largely statistics and mathematics. This is why Say himself--an entrepreneur, banker, writer and thinker on a myriad of subjects--balked at simplifying economic data to mathematical and statistical form: he noted that doing so separated the data from the particular causes and conditions of the time and place of their existence. He favored an approach more related to chemistry, where one examines what happens to certain factors given certain real conditions and then makes logical inferences to generalize conclusions, repeating the "experiment" to confirm those conclusions. Holding the opinion that Keynes used an oversimplification of "Say's Law," a straw man, in order to falsely invalidate the "Law" hardly disqualifies a person from discussing the status of the "law" after 200 years of its first statement. Rather, such a view provides a useful framework to reevaluate the direction economics has taken since Keynes' misstatement in 1936.
This book is an excellent presentation and evaluation of a little over a half dozen different schools of thought's unvarnished view of Say's Law by renowned scholars in each of those schools of thought. This book is an outstanding springboard for thoughtful discussion and analysis of an idea wrongly brushed under the carpet by a few modern ideologues who came to dominate state supported economic education to the detriment of all mankind, in this reviewer's opionion, as it has caused the most economically damaging economic misconceptions to persist and propagate.

Say's Law has had an interesting history. The subject of intense debate among leading economists of the early 19th century, it gradually came to form the backbone of the later classical understanding of recession, which stated that downturns could only be caused by errors in production, not by a failure of effective demand. This notion was suddenly and violently overturned by the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s. But there exists a growing chorus of skeptics who maintain that perhaps the classics really did have something important to offer. As such, we have come full circle, and this principle is once again the subject of lively debate.

With contributions from authors possessing a wide range of perspectives, this collection offers a fascinating snapshot of the current (or nearly current) state of the debate on the issue. As is to be expected, the quality is uneven: Mark Skousen's essay seems like little more than an excuse to promote his own Gross Output statistics, and I find it hard to imagine how anyone could be impressed by Steve Keen's neo-Marxian criticism of Say's Law. But overall, there is plenty of good-quality reasoning, both for and against the classical understanding of Say's Law. Regardless of any preconceived opinion that the reader brings on the issue, he or she is sure to learn something new, and to encounter stimulating challenge from a worthy opponent.

Kates, the editor of this book,presents a collection of essays written on Say's Law by different contributors whose main manner of exposition is to present huge amounts of quotations and/or textual interpretation(and reinterpretation,followed by rereinterpretation).Each author claims that his particular mixture of quotations and interpretations is correct.All of the essays in this book suffer from the same errors as originally presented and incorporated by Kates in his 1998 book,"Say's Law and The Keynesian Revolution:How Macroeconomics Lost Its Way".I strongly recommend that a reader of this review read my more detailed review of that book.All of the essayists,when they mention or discuss Keynes's General Theory(GT;1936) summary of Say's Law in chapter 3,treat Keynes's statements in this chapter as the alpha and the omega of Keynes's treatment of Say's Law in the GT.Keynes gave a very precise mathematical description of Say's Law in chapter 19 of the GT on pp.261-263 which is totally ignored ,not only by every author in this book of collected essays,but by every economist who has written on Keynes's book over the last 65+ years.If,and only if,the marginal propensity to consume equals 1 will there be NO demand deficiency in the macroeconomy.Keynes generalizes this to include spending on investment if the capital stock is not at an optimal level-mpc+mpi=1 must occur if there is to be no involuntary unemployment in an economy.mpc equals the marginal propensity to spend on consumption goodsand mpi equals the marginal propensity to spend on investment goods.Keynes then incorporates this condition in an optimality condition that simultaneously applies to both the commodity market and the labor market using a microeconomic structure of purely competitive firms and industries seeking to maximize their expected economic profits:w/p=mpl/(mpc+mpi).Unless mpc+mpi=1 holds,it is impossible to clear the labor market and reach a stable equilibrium.The result will be a permanent disequilibrium in the labor market and an unemployment equilibrium in the commodity market.Attempts to cut the money wage will simply make the unemployment problem worse.I recommend that a reader of this review purchase a copy of Keynes's GT instead of buying a book where each of the authors demonstrates a lack of mathematical literacy.