>Or, as Victoria Chick put it in Macroeconomics After Keynes:
>
>>[Effective demand] is not a schedule - it is the point on the
>>schedule of firms' anticipation of aggregate demand which is 'made
>>effective' by firms' production decisions. It is the volume of
>>output they decide to produce, valued at their asking price; it is
>>the value of anticpated sales. ED is an unfortunate term, for it
>>really refers to the output that will be supplied; in general,
>>there is no assurance that it will also be demanded.
Needless to say, I was not using the term "effective demand" in that sense. But in the more intuitive sense.
I doubt it makes the mechanics of the economy any clearer to refer to supply as "effective demand". But of course the role of the economist is not to make things clearer. Quite the opposite. One should never take anything they say at face value, since you never know when they are using words Humpty-Dumpty style. "Black", for example, might be used by an economist as a "technical term" for "white", so unless you are careful to read the footnoted definitions you might get entirely the wrong impression from reading a sentence written by an economist containing the technical term "black".
The safest thing is never to read anything written by an economist. In fact I think their products should carry mental health warnings.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas