Jean-Baptiste Say

Say was a manufacturer before he was an economist, and the distinction mattered. Where his contemporaries theorized about markets from the outside, Say had organized workers, procured raw materials, and watched individual products fail while the aggregate economy kept running. His 1803 Traité d’économie politique contained the insight that would define—and be mangled by—two centuries of argument: production and demand are linked through the circuit of income, not a simple equation of supply equaling demand. What makes Say uniquely useful to the age of large language models is not the slogan his name is attached to but the taxonomy his simplifiers discarded: three categories of demand, each with a different relationship to supply, each with a different adoption curve. The third category—latent demand that precedes supply and accumulates as potential energy—describes the sixty-six-year buildup of creative pressure in the global technology economy with a precision no other economic model matches. When the gap between imagination and