Finally, a Use for Dinosaurs and Doughnuts | OZY Weekend Highlights

From doughnut economics to singing protests, here’s the best of OZY this week.

Communities continue to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Florence and super Typhoon Mangkhut. As the healing from these natural disasters begins to take shape, some new science developments this week may provide hope for mending other wounds on the planet. For one, scientists have turned to DNA testing to intervene in ivory-smuggling cartels in Africa. Researchers have also proposed an idea to build walls on the seafloor to help hold back sea level rises. And finally, notoriously standoffish octopuses given MDMA tend to let their tentacles down, according to an experiment on the ancient origins of social behavior.

Now that the weekend has arrived, it’s time to relax and settle in with some great reading. Check out 10 of our favorite stories on OZY this week.

Economist Kate Raworth’s simple drawings reframe the long-held economic notion of endless growth.

What if the reason the planet is in such a mess boils down to nothing more than a series of misunderstandings? And how quickly would things turn around if these bugs could be fixed? Kate Raworth thinks false assumptions made by the men who began devising modern economic theory 250 years ago explain much of the inequality, environmental destruction and social injustice rampant in the world today. Correct these errors, she argues, and a new way of thinking about money could start to change the world.

An economist at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, Raworth scored a surprise hit in 2017 when she published her manifesto for a new economics — a book based on two circles she had doodled then stuffed in a drawer and forgotten about five years earlier.

Called Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, the book has been translated into 15 languages and has won a cult following among executives, government officials and urban designers.

William Darity Jr., a Duke University professor, has pushed the idea of a federal jobs guarantee into the mainstream.

There may be a day when the federal government guarantees a quality job to everyone who wants one, an increasingly popular notion as we arrive at the 10-year anniversary of the global financial crisis. Historians can trace the program back to a guy who plays the blues harmonica.

William Darity Jr. is an economist and the director of Duke University’s Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity. But he’s better known as someone who has authored or co-authored hundreds of economics journal articles, not to mention a macroeconomics textbook. And even more striking than the volume of this musically minded economist’s scholarly output are the questions he’s chosen to explore.