James Ream

As this recent issue of Time magazine predicts, the new ten-year trend is “The Dropout Economy,” where young people are forced to explore radical alternatives as work disappears and the financial burden becomes intolerable: “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.” Time’s forecast could be read as a desperate plea that young people, instead of rising up in fury against the older generation that depleted the planet’s resources at their expense, will make virtue out of necessity: “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.” -Exerpt from This Daniel Pinchbeck article.