The Dropout Economy
“Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college.
But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.
Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.”
Read the entire article at the source: Time Magazine – 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years
The future is now. Millions of people are already doing this as they struggle to survive in an economy that’s running on fumes at best. Many are combining natural building – low cost housing made of local materials such as earth, wood poles, pallets, straw and recycled materials – with renewable energy, permaculure/organic gardening, digital resources and barter economy. As the next logical step for society, people are taking what works and leaving behind what doesn’t.