In view of the rapid growth in the number of economic journals since the War, and the consequent shortage of conscientious and competent referees, in view also of the political biases and personal predilections to which the economic analysis of others can be subjected, the ambitious student can no longer count on being able to follow the evolution of some specialised aspect of the subject through a reading of the main journals. A few of the pertinent articles will generally turn out to be largely in error, and of those which advance the subject in some respects some will have created confusion in others. So it has been with the recent literature on consumer surplus. True, if a subject is inherently complex, no expositional talent can render it simple. But in fact the analysis of consumer surplus is basically a straightforward matter, one which skill, patience, and misunderstanding, have combined to make difficult and misleading. The greater part of the unnecessary difficulty in this literature appears to have arisen from an imperfect appreciation, even among competent economists, of the full implications of the ordinalist revolution which, following the earlier writings of Pareto and Slutsky, was formally initiated by Hicks and Allen in 1934. The writings of Hicks between 1939 and 1944 produced definitions of consumer's surplus that are simple, unambiguous, and allocatively operative within a Pareto context. The concepts and the relevant analysis were further simplified in Hicks' Revision of Demand Theory (1956) from where they found their way into popular texts and surveys. And yet the journal articles on the subject appearing in the last few years1 have managed to produce complications and paradoxes which 1 Those in the better known journals include Burns (1973), Cur rie et al. (1971), Foster and Neuberger (1974), Glaister (1974), Harberger (1971), Hause (1975), Mohring (1971), Silberberg (1972), and Winch (1965). Zeitschr. f. Nationalokonomie, 37. Bd., Heft 1-2 1