Jacque Fresco is an American futurist and self-described social engineer. Fresco is self-taught and has worked in a variety of positions related to industrial design and the aircraft industry.Fresco writes and lectures his views on sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural-resource management, cybernetic technology, automation, and the role of science in society. Fresco is the director of The Venus Project. Fresco advocates global implementation of a socioeconomic system which he refers to as a "resource-based economy.He grew up in a Sephardi Jewish home in Bensonhurst in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. According to Fresco, he had no interest with formal schooling and "dropped out of school at 14." Fresco grew up during the Great Depression period.Fresco spent time with friends discussing Darwin, Einstein, science, and the future. Fresco attended the Young Communist League. After a discussion with the League president during a meeting Fresco was 'physically ejected' after loudly stating that 'Karl Marx was wrong!' Fresco later turned his attention to Technocracy. In the mid-1930s, Fresco traveled west to Los Angeles where he began a career as a structural designer.Some aspects of Fresco's ideas have been compared to thinkers from the nineteenth century. Titles such as The Paradise within the Reach of all Men without Labor by Powers of Nature and Machinery, Emigration to the Tropical World for the Melioration of All Classes of People of All Nations, and The New World or Mechanical System were written in the 1800s by John Adolphus Etzler who has been described by independent scholar, Anna Notaro, as an early forerunner to Fresco's ideas. Likewise, Ebenezer Howard and his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow, as well as the Garden City Movement during the early 1900s has been described, by Morten Grønborg of Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, as another predecessor.
