from a priveledged youth and an intellectual family, chronic underacheiver and uncomforming misfit buckminster fuller (1895-1983) was educated at prestigious preporatory schools, twice attendeding harvard university. having proven himself an academic failure, fuller worked low-income jobs as a meat packer, mechanic, and while in the navy a radio operator, editor, and crash rescue commander. 

after the death of his young daughter in 1922 he became intensely depressed and suicidal. within 5 years and by age 32 he was bankrupt, jobless and living in public housing. finally hitting his lowest point bucky had a revelation: he decided to conduct "an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity." he thusly became one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century; an early environmentalist, a champion of human potential, and a gifted inventor, most notably of the geodesic dome, a wonder of architecture maximizing space using minimal materials.

 

 "We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."