
The Dropout Economy - jlhamilton
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,1971133_1971110_1971126,00.html
======
cschneid
I'm gonna go with "probably not".

The article starts with a standard argument that schools suck, then launches
into a libertarian utopia forecast. I'm not sure how you can have both a
information economy AND people who can't put in the time at a school to learn.

Schools aren't some evil conspiracy to teach conformance, they're the only way
to teach basic info to lots of kids. And if kids can't sit through it long
enough to learn, the majority won't self teach either, no matter how much you
want them to. So what do those people do?

There are other models for schooling, but covering classic
reading/writing/math/history is still pretty important, and modern schools do
a reasonable job of providing that the majority of kids.

~~~
oldgregg
Nice try, blaming those dumb students for an education system that's failing
them. The problem is they _don't_ do a reasonable job of teaching the basics.
That's why poor minorities in DC and other places are demanding school
vouchers-- but as long as teacher unions care more about their jobs than
students not shit is going to happen.

Education has been going to hell for the past 30 years (or longer) so please
don't delude yourself into thinking anything is going to magically change. The
only change will be new legislation that _restricts_ self-funded alternative
education. (Maybe you've already noticed governments trying to shutdown food
co-ops under the guise of "public health")

~~~
Xichekolas
I think the truth is somewhere in between.

Yes, there are a ton of failing school districts, but it's not as if kids are
clamoring to learn all they can and being told no. Kids aren't really
motivated to learn the stuff (not that they ever have been in the history of
education), and those schools aren't doing any motivating. It requires both
parties to try.

I think the idea of fixing schools has, and will continue to be, examined to
death. What no one seems to examine is the other half of it. How can we as a
society stop perpetuating the "learning is uncool" myth? Maybe it's because a
math competition will never be as exciting as a football game, maybe it's just
part of human nature to be skeptical of intellectualism as a defense mechanism
for the ego... I don't really know. But I don't think you can "solve
education" without paying attention to that part as well.

~~~
oldgregg
But the cultural problem you're talking about is _caused_ in large part _by_
the structural problem. Students slack off because the system passes students
along with impunity. Why bother studying math when you know you will get
promoted anyway? The only way to fix that is to allows schools to kick poorly
performing students out. There are plenty of students who want to do well but
the system crushes them.

~~~
antauth
What do you propose they do with the kids they kick out?

~~~
artsrc
I don't know what the parent proposes, but generally people propose that kids
who read at a 2nd grade level, stay in 2nd grade.

------
tjic
The lead sentence is

 _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_

Anyone catch the logical and rhetorical flaw ?

First, we talk about how MIDDLE class kids are taught not to drop out.

Then we seemlessly move to _all_ kids.

And...surprise! Some of them drop out.

Because, duh!, not all kids are middle class kids.

After reading that much stupid in the first half of the first sentence I
stopped reading the article.

~~~
Tycho
Perhaps the author considers non-middle-class people to constitute
(significantly) less than 30% of the population.

~~~
philwelch
Not surprising. Most Americans consider themselves middle-class: poor people
think they are lower middle class and rich people think they are upper middle
class. This is why "the middle class is disappearing" is such an effective
political message: most people identify with the middle class.

It probably doesn't help that the American class system is vague. There's no
official threshold between the classes. In some countries, the "upper class"
is, by definition, descended from nobility, so even a British billionaire
would still be middle class.

------
grellas
If I were asked (as the author here was) to put together a piece on "10 ideas
for the next 10 years" as part of a series subtitled "a thinker's guide to the
most important trends of the new decade" - and for a national magazine to boot
- I would at least _try_ to make it tight and coherent, backed up by logical
thought and good examples.

In this article, the author nowhere even states the theme he is trying to
develop - instead, he presents a grab-bag of under-developed ideas, many of
them cliched.

If you read the piece itself, I challenge you - quick now - to state its
principal theme.

Here is my best guess: "Young people of all political persuasions are today
increasingly rejecting middle-class ideals of school and work in favor of new
forms of communitarian living by which they are returning to the soil and are
otherwise seeking to escape the reach of nanny-state government."

This is just a guess cobbled together from fragments scattered throughout this
piece.

What are those fragments?

Within a few paragraphs (about 1,000 words), we have a jumble of ideas that
includes: 30% school drop-out rates; educational stagnation; projections of
"fiscal doom;" jobless recovery; New Deal programs about to "starve;"
sputtering industrial agriculture; millions of families living "off the grid;"
food-distribution systems based on ancient Mayan know-how; communes and co-ops
avoiding the nanny state; bourgeois rebels; exploding home schools; self-
sufficient vertical farms built from scrap; an underground economy using
barter/virtual currencies; libertarian "hacktivists; ever-increasing
productivity levels; a surge in home jobs that will revive suburbs that are
today "ghost towns;" fewer private homes and more "cohousing communities;"
"gated communities" effectively seceding from their municipalities to pursue
their own view of the good life; "broadband socialism;" a "new individualism
on the left and the right; "freeganism;" "cage-free" families; and 23-year-
olds plotting a cultural insurrection that will knock American society "off
its axis."

It all makes the head spin (not the ideas themselves, about which I do not
comment, but the way in which they are presented). When it is all said and
done, who knows what the author really intended? He makes you work really hard
to figure it out and then leaves you with a sense that the effort was not
really worth it.

For some excellent guidelines on good essay writing (in this case, for
undergraduates), see this splendid piece that got few HN upvotes when it ran
(at an odd time, I think) but sets forth fine guidelines for aspiring students
writing in this format:
[http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/02/good_writing_in_politic...](http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/02/good_writing_in_political_scie.html).

------
AngryParsley
_Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering
their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells._

Fuel cells are for energy storage, not generation. Something has to make the
hydrogen (or hydrocarbon) to power them. Also, fuel cells use platinum as a
catalyst. You know, rare expensive stuff that has to be dug out of the ground,
processed, and refined before it can be shipped to factories that build fuel
cells.

Living off the grid would require land for solar cells and/or wind turbines,
and energy storage mechanisms for when it's neither sunny nor windy. Building
this stuff requires factories (again), raw materials (again), infrastructure,
and R&D. A small community can't afford these things. And that's just for
basic stuff like electricity and transportation. The small communities could
solve this by banding together and contributing resources to a collective
pool. Some sort of federated 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._

So... what happens to the old people? How do these small communities trade?
I'm guessing quite a few will be landlocked. If trade is limited, how do these
little utopias have modern medicine? An MRI machine needs to be topped up with
liquid helium to maintain its superconducting coils (which are manufactured in
factories-blah blah blah). Contrast agents use rare elements like gadolinium.

The writer doesn't seem to realize just how interconnected the world economy
is. Almost nothing I own was made anywhere near where I live. I can't start my
day without touching something built at least 1000 miles away.

~~~
jackfoxy
There's been a lot of serious talk about living off the grid since the '60s.
Trouble is the grid is an engineering marvel that delivers a heck of a lot of
utility. (OK the pun is intended, but still informative.) Living off the grid
is likely to remain the provence of dedicated hackers for a long time to come,
not something for the masses.

------
hristov
This should be titled "How I learned to stop being afraid and love the new
upcoming mad max world."

I wonder what those new and exciting jobs will be in that post apocalyptic
world the author pines for. Sexual slavery? Hunting rats for meat and fur? The
technically inclined can scavenge parts from rusting machines built in the
magical old times and try to fashion some kind of working vehicles out of
them. Maybe the more artistically inclined can try being jesters to the local
warlord.

The relative prosperity of our current lives depends on the incredible
interconnectedness of society which allows high efficiencies by having people
specialise and become very efficient in some very narrow areas of expertise.
Just think of an ordinary $600 computer and imagine the tens or hundreds of
thousands of engineers whose specialised knowledge went into making it. It is
only a highly complex and interconnected society that can come up with
something like that.

And if most people start "living off the grid" or disconnecting from society,
or if we stop training our children how to live in society (which is what
school is supposed to be for), you better get ready for types of poverty that
you have never imagined even in your worst nightmares.

Oh and if everybody starts dropping out of school and society, good luck
coming up with those "dirt cheap fuel cells."

It is very disturbing how a lot of people are getting a bigger and bigger hard
on for some kind of an Armageddon event.

~~~
krschultz
That definitely sounds better than raising the top marginal tax rate by 5%.

------
Periodic
Reads like a concept for a Cory Doctorow novel to me.

I dislike that the author is simply stating all these amazing and utopian
things that are going to happen without much in the way of facts to back it
up. It sounds like his dream more than anything concrete.

~~~
ziadbc
Wow, you read my mind.

------
shalmanese
I often rate articles on "stupidities per paragraph" or even, in extreme
cases, "stupidities per sentence". This is the first article I've read that
can be accurately described with "stupidities per character".

~~~
stellar678
So you're saying there are at least ~6,500 identifiable stupidities in this
article? Of course you're not.

Point being: hyperbole has value, for this author and for you.

~~~
jbooth
I'd say shalmanese is a far better writer than the author, based on the
samples I've seen.

------
3pt14159
I don't think the author realizes how expensive it is to abandon society. I
certainly would love to live in the middle of the forest with my own little
hobby farm and pasture (and internet connection, of course) but for me to
continue to work in a tech field, even remotely, I need things from the
outside, like shingles, nails, plywood, hard drives. All together I probably
need about $100k to $400k, depending on what type of living conditions I want,
and that is with me still working as a knowledge worker on contract.

"Encrypted Digital Currencies" psshh. If the courts are not their to enforce
ownership, the currencies will never take hold. It my as well read "Encrypted
Digital Monopoly Money". The only type of currency that could possibly hold
value for an semi-extended enough period of time would be some really stable
MMORPG, but even there I'm grasping at straws.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I could see something like Facebookbux taking hold. Assuming FB actually
launches a payment system, and their effective fees aren't too high.

I think one reason FB's payment system has been so long in coming is that
they've been thinking through all the implications of being a parallel
currency.

I'm guessing at that, but it seems likely.

~~~
sjsivak
They already exist and are called facebook credits:
<http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1038>

~~~
waterlesscloud
Hey, I'd missed that Farmville is accepting FB Credits now. That's pretty big.

They hadn't truly launched the credit system in a real sense. It existed, but
was so low profile as to be non-existent, which I assumed was intentional. But
with Farmville signing on, that's a pretty real launch.

The fee structure is still exhorbitant, though. Again, maybe intentional, to
prevent it from being a practical parallel currency.

~~~
jbooth
Probably intentional because that's their estimation of the demand curve --
their customers are app-writers who have to make a living off of facebook.

------
jfager
Everyone I know who leads the kind of lifestyle this article is touting is a
drop out, yes. Trouble is, they dropped out of grad school, not high school.

------
epochwolf
_Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school_

I hate this statistic. I've known several people that dropped out of high
school to get a GED instead. (It was faster for them and they were sick of
school.) Others had to drop out of school because their family kicked them out
of their house at 18. Both of them got GEDs later.

~~~
stellar678
I'm among those students who dropped out of high school to accelerate my
escape. I guess the phrase drop out hasn't dropped its negative connotations,
so the author was using it to grab attention. But the essay is really about
alternative paths to life goals, which is what many 'high school dropouts' are
after.

~~~
rdl
I also dropped out of high school (and never bothered to get a GED; I went to
college for a while and then dropped out to do a startup, so I've ended up
with neither diploma).

It's kind of fun being able to put "high school dropout" on forms, while not
being a deadbeat.

~~~
stellar678
I'm impressed you got a college to accept your application without some kind
of high school equivalency certification. How'd you manage that?

A few years out of school, however, and it's become very clear to me that "I
just worked on this project for 6 months where we learned XYZ, had some hard
times and eventually failed/succeeded/moved on." is much more attractive to
the kind of people I want to work with than "I graduated cum laude from XYZ
special university."

~~~
rdl
I was 16. MIT doesn't really care about high school diplomas. I'd already done
1580/1600 SAT and had a grad student and associate prof at MIT write letters
of recommendation based on performance in a summer program (social
engineering...)

------
MaysonL
While the author's analysis of the current situation is fairly accurate, his
predictions seem to me to be wildly off.

There's a pretty strong movement going on, bringing scientific method to
teaching. It's chronicled in a great NYT article:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all)

Basically it boils down to:

1\. Find good teachers, based on how much their students improve. (Students of
the top 5% of teachers improve test scores _a full year_ more per year than
students of the bottom 5%).

2\. Analyze what the good teachers do that works better than what other
teachers do. (For a small example: Stand still while giving instructions:
moving around distracts).

3\. Teach these techniques to other teachers, and analyze the results.

This process, if scaled, seems to me to have far more potential for improving
the current system, than any wild-eyed tech-mediated vision of home-schooling
[not to knock home schooling: it works great, but it ain't gonna scale to
anywhere near a majority of the population].

------
greenlblue
All the nonsense aside I think it's true that people are no longer happy with
"one size fits all" kinds of policies and institutions. This is not a bad
thing and is simply one of the byproducts of improving technology that
empowers individuals to pick and choose what fits them best be it education,
food, clothes, etc.

~~~
jbooth
If you're referring to the current state of unease within the electorate, I
think it's the exact opposite issue -- how many times have you heard someone
say "too much change"?

~~~
greenlblue
Politicians are a really poor metric when it comes to measuring change. They
are always at least 2 decades behind the times and I can't really blame them
for it since the people that put them in office are in their late 60s.

~~~
jbooth
I'm not talking politicians, I'm talking the tea partiers -- the world's
changing and it's not easy for everybody. A feeling that the world is changing
and the easy ride we had is going away seems to be a powerful undercurrent
there, to me at least. YMMV.

~~~
greenlblue
The world is always changing and only those with no historical perspective
cling to bygone days.

~~~
jbooth
Well, certainly I agree.

------
lsc
I'm still amused by liberal arts majors who somehow think that you can't work
in the technical fields without a degree. Sure, a degree helps, but if you
know what you are doing, it's not required.

Now, I know some really awesome people who went to college, and claim that
they learned a lot there, I'm not saying it doesn't have value. hell, all
other things being equal, I'll pick the applicant with a degree over the
dropout, when I have the chance. But I also know many programmers and
SysAdmins who didn't go to college, and a few who didn't finish high school.
We don't need to live 'off the grid' mad max style. Not having a degree means
that you will need to do real work for retail wages, for a while, but once you
have experience, you get to upgrade to real wages.

------
sethg
It took me approximately sixty seconds on Google to bring up a page from the
Census Bureau, breaking down income according to education level:

[http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032009/perinc/new03...](http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032009/perinc/new03_001.htm)

The median earnings of an American over 25 with less than a 9th-grade
education is $18,180. For a high-school diploma or GED, it’s $27,963. For a
bachelor’s degree (“for a lot of them, an overpriced status marker and little
else”, says Salam), it’s $48,097.

In the sample from this survey, the folks with less than a 9th-grade education
represented about 5% of the total; does Salam really have any evidence that 5%
of the US adult population lives cheerfully off subsistance agriculture and
cryptocash?

------
jsz0
This article is too rooted in the middle class perspective for my tastes. To
me the education system isn't failing these kids -- it's the other way around.
They goto pretty good/safe schools and simply don't want the education being
offered because they think they can beat the system. Probably many of them can
because they have a safety net that allows them to reconsider their options
down the road. It's the poor minorities who have dramatically higher drop out
rates we should be considered about. If you don't have many opportunities in
life you should maximize the "free" public education you can get and make the
most of it.

~~~
stellar678
Do you find it reasonable to burden a 5-year-old with the responsibility of
maximizing the public education he is being offered? A 10-year-old?

------
ynniv
When did Neal Stephenson start writing for Time?

~~~
redcap
That was what I was thinking - except stuff Stephenson writes about in Snow
Crash that seems similar to what happens here is after some kind of societal
meltdown.

------
euroclydon
The problem I see with this, is that the most talented middle class folks are
still employed. It's these talented people who have the drive, creativity, and
resourcefulness to home-school well, and to build new communities. Until and
unless they are out on their butts, I don't think we will see this type of
positive societal transformation.

It's likely we'll see more: crime and despair, and that all of those
unemployed former worker-drones that the school system wrought, will
increasingly look to the government for subsidies.

------
motters
Rather doomy for my taste, but I think we are heading towards a complex future
something like this - closer to cyberpunk than to Star Trek. Even though the
current recession is a temporary affair, there are good reasons to be
concerned about growing technological unemployment and its effects in the next
few decades, especially upon white collar "knowledge workers".

~~~
Adam503
The economy is starved for capital. Rich folks are hoarding it.

If we don't get all that capital out of the trust funds of the rich and back
flowing through the economy, yeah, we're headed a dystopian future.

------
stellar678
It's couched in pretty exciting/revolutionary/utopian language, but are the
ideas really more likely to become mainstream now than at any time in the
past? Seems like today's spin on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out>

------
thornad
Very good article. I am surprized Times and CNN published it, given their
track record for crap. We better get ready for the future. Go with the flow or
risk being left behind with the old desintegrating structures. Same thing for
our belief structures. Hehe.. this one is gonna be a biggie.

------
Adam503
The writer of this article is a National Review blogger. Jonah Goldberg is one
of the editors.

~~~
gyardley
Point being? I hope I'm missing something, and mentioning the writer's other
activities and associations isn't a substitution for evaluation of the
content.

~~~
drunkpotato
True, but it is helpful for evaluating what's useful to read.

------
jbooth
tl;dr:

Get off my lawn!

