I noticed a pattern of college educated people starting artisanal businesses. I know a person with a legal degree that is baking pastries, for example. That's j

I noticed a pattern of college educated people starting artisanal businesses. I know a person with a legal degree that is baking pastries, for example. That's just one person of course but I think it's getting quite common. If you look around here in Berlin, there sure are a lot of very well educated expats running all sorts of small businesses making coffee, craft beer, donuts, sourdough bread, whatever. They've given up on the white collar careers they were trained for. It's not just a Berlin thing. It's happening all over the place. I bought some regional wine in the Netherlands when I visited my family there. In a small village from a tiny business that produces wine locally and sells it on local markets. I should add that the Netherlands is not known for its wine production. That's a completely new thing (thanks to global warming). This is far away from the big cities. The same market featured all sorts of local produce. In the US you'd call it a farmer's market. Expensive produce made by people with decent educations aimed at people with disposable income. What's an artisanal business, it's a business model where the added value is in something being done with a personal touch and craft. Mostly without a lot of automation. People pay extra for that sort of thing and the people doing this stuff tend to enjoy what they are doing. The whole point is quality, craft, and tradition. As volume production for highly automated/processed stuff scales, prices for that drop and demand for the artisanal stuff increases. Just an observation: automation is a race to the bottom and it merely serves to enhance the value of stuff that is harder to automate. We automate the boring, low value stuff first. That creates more capacity for doing the high value stuff. Which as the wording implies is great for economic growth. Related to this is the re-shoring of manufacturing jobs. Now that automation has lowered the price of doing things locally with fewer workers, it no longer makes economic sense to ship stuff half way across the planet. Plus people like the idea of locally produced stuff. Americans want US made cars and phones. Germans like their German cars. Etc. Yes, a lot of that manufacturing uses less people to produce vastly more goods. But that's just causing them to grow faster and employ more people. That's why there is a labor shortage instead of mass unemployment. Despite macro economic circumstances, a few years of lock down, etc. This stuff is just fueling economic growth. The whole economy is shifting to emphasize qualities such as being locally produced, sustainable, etc.