ABSTRACT
The future, the poet Paul Valery once noted, isn’t what it used to be. Not so very long ago, we took the future more or less for granted. We planned its arrival in a state of relaxed, almost lazy anticipation. Our future and that of our children seemed relatively assured. The future had a soothing ring to it, an optimistic chord created out of deliberate forethought and the hard-earned results of past effort.
