Taylor Swift embodies female economic power in new book by KU professor

Misty Heggeness of the University of Kansas wrote the new book “Swiftynomics,” about women's economic power. (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

This week, a new kind of Taylor Swift tour began in Overland Park, Kansas: a book tour. 

Misty Heggeness released “Swiftynomics,” a book explaining how female economic power radiates from the music star — and, as the subtitle says, how “Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy.”

Heggeness teaches and researches at the University of Kansas as the co-director of the Kansas Population Center and an associate professor of economics and public affairs. (As colleagues at KU, we shared a panel discussion last year.)

Heggeness also created the Care Board, a dashboard of economic statistics that tracks the economic value of caretakers, hoping to answer how the nation relies on unpaid work. The Care Board was partially inspired by her life as a working mother, balancing her job at the U.S. Census Bureau, raising her young children and studies aimed toward her Ph.D.

Heggeness’s 15-city book tour — from Coral Gables, Florida, to Los Angeles — over the next few months will hit some of the same locations as Swift’s Eras tour.

We sat down this week in her office at the KU-Edwards campus for an interview about female economic power, Taylor Swift and the hidden work of women. 

How significant do you think Swift is as an economic force? If we revisit her emergence 10 or 20 years from now, are we going to see her as a turning point in terms of gender and economics?

For me, Taylor is amazing. Sure, a phenomenon, super intelligent, etc. But for me, it’s not Taylor who is the economic powerhouse. It’s actually her fans. And that’s why I call the book “Swiftynomics.” And that’s why I don’t have a picture of Taylor on the cover.

The most interesting phenomenon for me about Taylor is the way in which she’s been able to capture female consumers, and it’s because she knows their experiences. She can speak right straight to them. She writes content that is about them, from their perspective.

All of that tells me that women’s consumption power has shifted in this country. Part of it has to do with women’s educational attainment. Part of it has to do with the women who came before us. (…) It’s not Taylor who is the economic powerhouse, it is all of her fans.

Can you describe the field of work that you describe as feminist economics, and how that it connects with Taylor Swift who is, in your words, an economic woman?

I’ll start by saying that this book has actually been — there’s been a little bit of pushback by feminist economists because I lead with a blond, blue-eyed lady in sparkly boots. So it’s not traditional feminist economics in the sense that.

There’s two ways to be an economist if you’re a woman, and the first is you basically pretend like you’re a man. So, you agree with all their models and their theories. Your research aligns really closely with those. And that means that you’re usually uncomfortable talking about whether or not there are actual gender differences in the world.

But “granola” economists are women who know that modern economic theory does not represent them. The models we use don’t accurately tell (women’s) stories. They’re very aware that in the 1970s, male labor economists just threw women out of samples and did “labor economics” just by looking at men. And so they started their own kind of branch of economics: feminist economics.

My goal and my hope is that we figure out a way to merge these two. … I definitely think that my book is feminist economics. But again, I am not interested in living outside of my profession. I want to live right in the middle.

Braiding together Taylor Swift’s economic impact with her gender as a woman seems inevitable, because her songs, her videos, and her social media confront gender quite often. What other economic women do you think are finding economic power in an interesting way?

Obviously, Beyonce. Taylor and Beyonce have really said to the music industry: “We’re not going to let you put us in the corner. And we have enough power, because our fans are powerful enough economically that we’re going to flip the switch.” And they’ve been able to sustain it.

The thing that’s unique about Taylor’s the Eras Tour: She structured that in the way that she wanted to live her life. So she only had concerts on weekends, and then she would go home during the week. Artists in the past never had that luxury. They had to do whatever the music (industry) told them to do.

Passages of your book argue that the influence that women have on the economy is largely invisible to economic metrics that we rely on. Or that they’re undervalued as economic metrics and therefore ignored. For instance, in the way working mothers put in extra caretaker work in addition to their paid jobs. Is the contrast between a hyper-visible Swift, who’s always in the media’s eye, and the often invisible, economic woman part of what makes Swift a compelling figure?

Taylor isn’t the majority of women. For the majority of women, the type of work that they do for their family is often unpaid and very time consuming. What I’m trying to do in this book is really help society understand time-intensive work — work that is often invisible to our employer, invisible oftentimes to the government. I’m trying to help society understand the ways in which that type of productivity, while it is beneficial and necessary for the family, is not necessarily efficient. And it hinders our society’s ability to be productive.

I often marvel at how strategic Swift and her team are — the seemingly small decisions and the signals to her fans. Can you pick out something that’s seemingly a minor decision that she made that you feel like has really interesting economic consequences?

A lot of the things that Taylor does to represent economic force are things that are more characteristic of men. Having said that, I’ll give you one example. 

On her new album, there’s a song called “Father Figure.” Taylor is really good about telling a story that has been very specific to her, but making it super generalizable. There were times early in her career where she would name boyfriends and whatever, but everything has gotten kind of more neutralized as she matures and ages. If you listen to “Father Figure” and you know Taylor’s story, one could assume that it’s about Scott Borchetta, the first person that she worked with when she was a teenager.

She signed with him because he let her write her own songs and sing her own songs ,where the other major labels would not let her do that because they didn’t find any economic value in catering to a young girl writing songs about the experience of teenage girls.

You could think, “Oh, this is a song about her relationship with Scott, and that he was a father figure to her,” if you listen to that song until minute two.

At minute two, she still sings about the father figure, but the father figure is her. … So instead of saying he, or instead of saying she, it becomes I, and everything else is the same. She does this flip where she empowers herself, and she becomes the father figure.

There’s somebody who’s dominant, and they somehow wronged her.

The last minute of the song says, “Now I’m the dominant. I was actually the father figure all along. Not you. And look how mistaken you were.”

On the Care Board’s website, it says that it uses “data to reveal the essential role of care in sustaining families, communities, workers, and the broader economy.” Often, academic work is born from a personal connection to the topic. How did care work become such a centerpiece of your academic work?

I used to like daydream in my little cubicle at the Census Bureau that my (male, childless) colleague at the end of the day would go home, kick off his loafers, go crack open a beer, sit in front of the TV, put his feet up on the coffee table and watch basketball games.

Meanwhile, I was getting to my car, rushing to the daycare before it closed, grabbing my kids, taking them home, getting them fed, getting them baths, reading to them — doing this whole second shift. And nobody at work cares, right? I had that very critical experience in my adult life when my kids were younger.

And it just became more and more blatant the more that I worked around economic statistics, that all of that work that I had been doing was not captured anywhere — the statistics that I was helping to produce.

Change is really slow in the federal government, and changing official anything is very challenging. One of the benefits of coming here to the University of Kansas was I had freedom to be able to think about re-envisioning what those statistics might look like if  instead of having official economic statistics built by older white male economists from the 1940s right after World War Two, instead of that, we had economic statistics but built by caregivers.

What would that look like? That’s what the Care Board is. So its priority is recentering the perspective on the caregiver and making sure that they’re represented in the data.

Does the Care Board have hopes of how that kind of data can be employed toward political change? Does it have an explicit goal besides just representing the truth and letting people do with it what they will?

My long-term goal is not that the Care Board stay at the University of Kansas. My long term goal is, I say, to strong-arm the Census Bureau — to convince the federal government to move it into their repertoire of economic statistics that they produce, so that it becomes an official component. … My hope is that at least there are elements of the Care Board that they think are important enough … to have the federal government start adapting.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.