Roughly half of all stars reside in 'old, red and dead' galaxies. These galaxies form stars at very low rates, have little cold gas and typically have a dominant stellar spheroid supported by random motions. In this talk, I will review the evolution of the old, red and dead early-type galaxy population, demonstrating that there is growth in this population between z~1 and the present day. I will show that this build-up affects even the most massive galaxies, although in that case the degree of growth in the population is substantially less certain. In both cases, I will argue that galaxy merging in the amount naturally predicted in a cosmological framework is a key (but by no means the only) driver of that evolution.