J Econ (2013) 108:203–205 DOI 10.1007/s00712-012-0312-6 BOOK REVIEW Balasko, Yves: General Equilibrium Theory of Value XII, 192pp. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2011. Cloth, £ 39.95 M. Ali Khan Published online: 5 October 2012 © Springer-Verlag Wien 2012 Yves Balasko is a mathematical economists’ mathematical economist, and to move away from the coined cliché, a widely-acknowledged expert in a form of economic expression informed by the field of differential topology. This is to say topology con- sidered from the point of view of the differential calculus: a vernacular that formalizes smooth mappings defined on locally Euclidean (or Banach) spaces, and develops the- orems for measures of their set of turning points. And to be sure, in keeping with the noun rather than its adjective, a mathematical economist is, in the first place, an economist; and with Balasko’s economics one cannot but associate elegance, parsi- mony, simplicity, and resulting profundity. This is of course in keeping with the work of the three economists of an earlier generation from whom he draws his inspiration: Debreu on the one hand, and Hicks and Samuelson on the other. And going back to an even earlier generation, Balasko’s economics, as those of Mill and Marshall, is primarily “pictorial economics”, economics done through geometric picture-panels. It can be an interesting parlour game to track the word picture and its derivatives in his expositions: leaving aside chapter titles of the volume at hand, one reads in his Postscript that the “equilibrium manifold approach has given us a remarkable picture between market (equilibrium) prices and the fundamentals of the economy [and that] such a picture was not available a generation ago.” As for his panels themselves, one cannot help recalling the flower-diagrams that Meade, Johnson and Jones used to depict solutions to problems of international trade, and Goodwin for those in growth and dynamics. And as with these theorists, Balasko brings to bear on his geometry an exquisite historical perspective and sensitivity: look, using again the volume at hand as an example, at his masterful delineation of relevant narratives at the end of Chapters 2 and 8, and the third section of his Postscript. M. Ali Khan (B ) The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA e-mail: akhan@jhu.edu 123