I turned first to the supplementary afterword written in early October for the paperback edition, just as all that Elliott and Atkinson had foretold came to pass. Their valedictory tone is free of both the triumphant "We told you so" (although they did, often) and the helpless "We're all doomed"; what they're interested in is the real future change implicit in the understanding that growth, the endless economic expansion of already developed countries, may have been no more than a historical aberration of the second half of the 20th century, in response to both the great depression and the material destruction of the second world war. They have a lot of wicked, angry fun with descriptions of the New Olympians - the financial-political elite who believed for 30 years that the rest of the human race existed only to enrich their superiors - and their collage of the policies of those decades and the catastrophes of the past 12 months is a sound basic introduction; but I want the next book on non-growth, chaps, and as soon as possible, please.