What Is Swiftynomics—and Why Does It Matter?
Taylor Swift didn’t just break records—she broke the way economists think about the economy. Because if one artist can reshape entire cities overnight, what else are we missing?
This week, economist Misty Heggeness uses the “Swift effect” to expose a bigger problem: the models we rely on weren’t built to see women’s power, unpaid care, or culture as real economic forces.
What would change about our economy if we actually counted women’s work—and treated culture as real economic power?
Misty Heggeness is an economist and the author of Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy, which uses Taylor Swift and broader pop culture as a lens for examining women’s economic power, labor markets, and the persistent blind spots in mainstream economic thinking.
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Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative?
Nick Hanauer:
Middle out economics is the answer.
Goldy:
Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Announcer:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Paul Constant:
Hey, Goldy.
Goldy:
Paul.
Paul Constant:
I have a question for you, Goldy.
Goldy:
Okay.
Paul Constant:
What’s your favorite Taylor Swift song?
Goldy:
Who? No, of course I know who Taylor Swift is. I may not be much into pop music, but I’d even recognize her face. If you showed me her face, I’d know who she was, which is more than I could say for most pop stars. But I do not have a favorite Taylor Swift song, not because I love them all equally, but because I could not name one.
Paul Constant:
Okay. All right. Great. Well, you are the perfect co-host for this episode.
Goldy:
I know, I know.
Paul Constant:
And by the way, for the record, I like Folklore as an album and Midnights also is an album. And I really like the song, I’m The Man, because I went down a huge Taylor Swift rabbit hole when the Eras Tour was going on a couple summers ago, because it was just such a huge thing. It was unignorable. Even a cultural idiot like you. Sorry, sorry, a pop-cultural idiot like yourself.
Goldy:
That stuff I listened to was popular in the 1950s and ’60s.
Paul Constant:
That’s why I said pop, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yes, exactly. Even a modern pop music idiot like yourself knew what was going on. You knew that Taylor Swift was dropping into these different cities and it was basically like, I almost want to say economic bomb, but it was a positive economic bomb. She was going from city to city and basically upending the transit, the systems, the hotels, the economies. She was at one point basically holding up the American economy coming out of COVID. It was really quite remarkable. So, yes, even you couldn’t ignore it to the point where you know her name and her face, which is maybe even-
Goldy:
That’s right.
Paul Constant:
… one step further than I thought was possible. Even though you are not the Taylor Swift expert that I need by my side, I thought you would be an interesting cohost. For today’s conversation with Misty Heggeness, she is the author of a book called Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy. And yes, and I’m sure you cringed when you saw the title of the book.
Goldy:
Yeah. Well, look, I think what we’ll do is there’s two of us here. We’ll split the chore here. You can work on the Swifty part of the book and I’ll work on the nomics.
Paul Constant:
Yeah. And because the nomics part is actually the meatier part of the book. There’s a lot of conversation about Swift as an economic actor and the impact she has on the economy, but she uses the book… In the book, she uses Taylor Swift as sort of a lens to talk about a bunch of different things, including all the work that labor that women put into the economy that doesn’t get measured. Something that’s especially close to my heart is she talks about how art and culture is often ignored by economics as a profession and economist in general. There’s a lot of really great economic thoughts in this book. There was one passage that really blew me away.
We have talked on this podcast a lot about homo economicus, the idea of the economic man who’s perfectly rational and the idea that the perfectly rational, perfectly selfish, perfectly informed utility maximizer that operates in the economy. And she asks this question, there’s this passage that I love. “What if today’s homo economicus is not a man, but rather a woman or perhaps someone who identifies as non-binary?”
Goldy:
And it’s interesting because that stood out to me too, Paul, because we’ve made fun of a lot. We’ve disputed the economicist part of it, the idea of economic man, that’s we behave like economic creatures. And it never occurred to me that, in fact, part of the problem was that we’re modeling this as a man specifically. Right. I thought of it as like humankind, but no, no, these economists, they’re really only looking at men.
Paul Constant:
It is absolutely an economic man. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And just that observation kind of blew open a door that had been, I didn’t even know was there when I was thinking about economics. And so, the book really gets into all of the things that aren’t measured. And so, I’m excited to talk to Misty Heggeness about the book and her observations about the economy.
Goldy:
Okay. Then let’s talk to Misty.
Misty Heggeness:
My name is Misty Heggeness. I am an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, former senior advisor at the US Census Bureau. And my book is called Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy.
Goldy:
I should start with just a fair warning as Paul can attest, I have no pop culture knowledge whatsoever, but Taylor Swift is big enough. I was telling Paul beforehand, I would recognize her face.
Misty Heggeness:
Well, it’s never too late, so I’m glad we’re here talking.
Goldy:
And I also have a confession to make. You talk in the book about how some football fans were unhappy about her showing up at Chiefs Games, and I’m one of them, but not for the reasons you cite in the book. It’s because she was raised like me to be a Philadelphia-
Misty Heggeness:
Eagles.
Goldy:
… Eagles fan, and this sort of disloyalty is just unforgivable. I mean-
Misty Heggeness:
Yeah, valid.
Goldy:
Even Travis’s brother is an Eagles fan, so I just have to start right there. So, you’re…
Misty Heggeness:
Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense.
Paul Constant:
Whereas I am familiar with Taylor Swift, but I don’t follow sports at all, so I did not get any of that last pick. So, I guess we should probably start with the obvious question and one that I’m sure you’ve answered a bunch before. Why use Taylor Swift as the lens for your book on economics?
Misty Heggeness:
Yeah. So, my book is a general overview of women in the economy with the focus on the modern woman. And so, thinking about how women act as economic agents today, and it actually looks different than the stereotypes that we have in our head about how women behave in the workforce or how they behave at home. And as an economist who lives deeply in this profession, I’m very aware of how these type of stereotypes around gender influence the way we see the world. They influence the models that economists work with. It infiltrates everything. And so, I’ve been working with data for more years than I would like to admit.
And one of my favorite subjects is sleuthing or one of my favorite things to do, sleuthing around in the data to look at what’s going on with women, and particularly mothers. I’m a mother myself. The data just keeps on telling us different stories than what we tell ourselves in the news media or what we think about women. And so, that’s what the book is about. It’s really about reframing how we think about women as economic agents today. And as I was developing the concept for the book, I had been following Taylor’s career and was just continually impressed with the way that she herself maneuvers in an industry that is very male-leaning, especially in leadership and executive roles in the music industry.
And I just felt like she would be such a great news and infusing the stories of her career into this book about how women behave today economically just felt like it had to be done. So, I did it.
Paul Constant:
Did that speak to you? I mean, I think as a woman in the economics field, it’s traditionally, I mean, it’s still overwhelmingly male, I believe, right? Statistically speaking.
Goldy:
Yeah, I think actually, you give it too much credit in the book for the progress it’s made because compared to other fields, it’s made far less progress.
Misty Heggeness:
It definitely has. So, I’m not of Taylor’s generation. I’m a little bit older than she is, but I do feel like there’s a lot of similarities in her experiences in the music industry and women’s experiences in the field of economics, definitely. And I think that women in the field of economics actually could learn quite a bit by observing and paying attention to the way that Taylor has maneuvered in her own space. And women in many industries, to be honest, I definitely over-identify with Taylor.
Paul Constant:
Before we dig too much more into the book, I also wanted to talk something that really struck me about your book and the reason I flagged it as something I wanted to discuss was it’s not just that it’s about a woman, but that it’s about culture and art, right? I mean, even though it’s stadiums and it’s a billion-dollar business, it’s art, right? And I think that economists tend to treat culture as separate from the real economy, right? In much the same way as they ignore a lot of women’s work, which we’ll get into soon. What do you think that we misunderstand when economists draw a line around culture and art as something sort of separate from the real economy?
Misty Heggeness:
Well, I mean, so I’ll just say to start out with that I really don’t appreciate how we teach economics to the younger generation today, which is you have this bland textbook and there’s lots of widgets and we talk about efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And we spend very little, if any time, talking about initial endowments and how there might be inequities there. One of the pieces of art and culture that I think is so beautiful is that it’s innovative and economists care a lot about innovation. We care a lot about technological change and innovation. And there’s so much innovation that happens in art.
And the other piece is that we have expectations about art and culture in the society around us. And those expectations fuel both how we see rank and order in society and then how we act amongst each other and within our social networks based on that rank and order. And that’s something that permeates everything we do as economic agents. And I don’t think that it’s possible to talk about economics and the economy as some blank white slate, I guess pun intended there with the… But it’s just like we need to incorporate that level of diversity and cultural differences into how we think about economic theories if we’re ever going to actually be helpful in the best way that we can in thinking about how economies function and how they flourish.
Goldy:
But if you can’t mathematize those things, how do you work them into a model?
Misty Heggeness:
Yeah. I love the fact that we are so hung up on math. I teach a class right now, economics, Taylor Swift, and the very first day of class I tell everyone, it’s upper level class. And I say,” There will be no math in this class. We’re not going to do math. “Math is easy, you memorize and it’s predictable and you just have to train yourself on it. It’s a lot harder to really use your brain to think about the broader aspects of what you’re doing. It’s easy to write down a model, but it’s harder to think about what actually belongs in that model. Once you figure out what actually belongs in that model, the math is generally usually straightforward. And I think economics is so caught up in math, math, math.
And then we just to the extreme that we don’t even value the ability to think about what actually belongs in this model and what actually are the determinants of influencing whatever outcome we’re interested in looking at. And I think we need to get better at that. I mean, yes, math is important in economics, don’t get me wrong. Everybody, yes, go take your linear algebra, go check your calculus, yes, do all the things, real analysis, but you should be able to study economics even without a heavy background in math. And the fact that we don’t let people do that is a big disservice to society.
Goldy:
One of my favorite quotes from an economist is a woman, is Joan Robinson’s classic quote, that the purpose of studying economics is to learn how not to be deceived by economists. And it’s funny, you talk about what belongs in the model. One of the things that clearly doesn’t belong in the Orthodox model is women for the most part.
Misty Heggeness:
Well, I mean, you look at the 1970s labor economists who would just throw women out of their models, because we were too complex to figure out how to model.
Goldy:
Both in terms of the contributions in the home being hard to, but not really hard. They just didn’t want to put in the work for that. As you mentioned in the book, there are ways to mathematize the contributions of home care and housework and cooking and so forth, but also too complex on the consumer side as well, because it was assumed while they’re not behaving rationally like as you talk about in the book, homo economicus.
Announcer:
Now we hear Goldy mentioning that great passage on “homo economicus”, Misty and her team were kind enough to provide us the segment from her book, Swiftynomics, narrated here by Nan McNamara.
Swiftynomics audiobook clip:
Traditional models of economics originated in the mid 19th century and assumed the existence of a generic non-gendered economic agent called homo economicus. Homo economicus was born in 1836 to John Stuart Mill and was later promoted by other male economists of the time. A 19th century ideal, homo economicus’s primary pursuit in life was to minimize costs while maximizing profits or earnings in business. Its goal was to maximize satisfaction or pleasure called utility. It was ageless, colorless, genderless, and identityless.
To top it off, homo economicus was something of a mathematical whiz, propelling linear algebra, calculus, and real analysis to the front of the classroom, where they became the gold standard in modern economics. In the 20th century, homo economicus grew some kahunas and began to be known as economic man. Math became prioritized as the most efficient, least biased and fastest method for accomplishing his primary pursuit in life, minimizing consumption of items and activities he does not like or need so that he can maximize consumption of things he does. To understand this, think about your own consumption patterns.
Your primary consumption goal might be to purchase the biggest, best truck you can, or maybe it is being able to afford the biggest, best home within a friend or acquaintance group, so you can flex your homeowner status. It might be owning the most parent approved career, one that gives you leverage over your siblings and parents. For parents, it might be the best education or childcare for your children. For economic man, every moment is spent in the pursuit of maximizing pleasure and experiences that bring joy.
Misty Heggeness:
So, let me just give you a Taylor Swift spin on this idea. When Taylor started in her career, she was 14. She wanted to write country music songs for other teenage white women, and that was really what she was passionate about. And she went to the country music industry and they said, “We’ll put you on a development contract,” which means they weren’t going to let her produce her own albums. They weren’t going to let her sing her own songs. She broke from that contract. She was, again, 14 years old. She broke from that contract and she went off with some guy who was starting his own label, which ended up being Big Machine.
And she took a risk with him by joining with him, but he agreed to let her write her own country music songs about the experience of young white teenage girls and then produce those albums to sell. And when you look back at that now, you have country music executives who were saying, “There’s no consumer market of value for us in teenage girls. We don’t think that writing country music songs that speak to the lived experiences of teenage girls has any value.” And look at Taylor now and all you can say is, “Boy, were they wrong? And gee, they must be kicking themselves in the shin right now.” And I feel like it’s similar with economics.
We’ve got some folks up at the very top of this established, well-oiled machine who are really convinced that their theories and their way of thinking about the world is the right way. They don’t necessarily see value in women’s contributions, women’s economic contributions. If they did, we’d be living in a different space and I’m just waiting for the next Taylor Swift of economics to come out and prove them wrong.
Goldy:
The Taylor Swift of Economics. Well, you know what? I think it would be more educational to have your intro economics class taught by a 14-year-old girl than most of the professors who teach it better that than Furman. I don’t know.
Misty Heggeness:
Yeah. So, I mentioned that I teach this class, Economics of Taylor Swift. This semester, I’m teaching it. It’s three guys and all women. And the first day of class, after class, they all shuffled out. I’m packing up my bags and then enter stage right, the next class comes in. It’s like five girls and the rest guys. And I asked them, I’m like, “Oh, what class are you here for?” Introduction to microeconomics and just painting the visual there. I’m teaching an economics class.
The next class was an economics class, but the fact that I am able to bring economics into a topic area that is of interest for women means that I get way more women in my class and there’s a lesson to be learned there in terms of how we teach economics.
Goldy:
And to be clear, there’s a lot of economics in this book. I mean, that’s the part that appeals to me, obviously, not attuned to pop music, but the way you use that to actually Taylor Swift and the other women you mentioned in the book to actually teach what’s wrong with Orthodox economics and the way it’s generally taught.
Misty Heggeness:
To be fair, I’m just doing that because I’m essentially telling the story of economics from my own perspective, from the way that I see it. And the way that I view it is a way in which I don’t want to believe that this dominant profession that has historically either not included me or not counted a lot of the work that I do in my own household, I don’t want to believe that that’s the correct path forward because it doesn’t represent who I am and it doesn’t represent all of my identity as an economist.
And that’s why I wrote this book, because if we’re going to frame things differently, if we’re going to have broader discussions that are more inclusive in the field of economics, we have to be willing to meet people where they are, and we have to be willing to think about economics in some alternative format, whatever that might be. And for me, that is bringing in this angle of all of the economic activity that women do that gets excluded from national accounts, et cetera, et cetera.
Paul Constant:
Let’s talk a little bit about care privilege. How does the labor market being built around that assumption change the outcomes of lives and labor and all of that? Who wins and who loses?
Misty Heggeness:
I think I came up with that concept of care privilege really just to try to identify something that I had been observing, at least in the political sphere, but pretty much everywhere. So, my mother and her brothers are of the baby boom generation, and my uncles have a ton of care privilege, a ton of care privilege. And so, I would go off to college when I was 18, 19, 20. And again, with my parents telling me, “You can be anything, you can do anything, the world is your oyster.” And then I would come home for Christmas break and it was like all of the women, my mom and all my aunts in the kitchen cooking the meal. And then we’d all eat.
And then we have this little trick in our family where myself and all of the cousins are responsible for washing the dishes. And so, this idea of care privilege is essentially you’re an able-bodied adult, but you have somebody else who takes care of your care needs. And I wanted a definition that wasn’t pejorative and I wanted a definition that wasn’t accusatory. So, we all have different levels of care privilege in our life and they ebb and flow over time. Sometimes we’re in a situation where somebody else is taking care of us because we’re sick or whatever it might be, or other times we have small children.
And so, we end up having to do a lot of caregiving or aging adults or aging parents, whatever it might be. But the interesting thing about care privilege is if you’re a person who has lots of it, oftentimes it’s more challenging or more difficult to understand the ways in which not having it holds other people back. And that’s the piece that gets at the invisible labor. And so, when I talk about care privilege, I do it within the context of policies because I think the US has really, really struggled to really support and sustain policies that allow people who don’t have care privilege to thrive in the labor market.
And so, one of the reasons why I think that is because if you look at the Hill, it’s changing over time. There’s more women, legislators, there’s more parents who are parent legislators, parents of small kids who go up to the Hill. But I think one of the reasons why we haven’t been able to successfully really create sustainable and lasting infrastructure in this country around providing care supports that families need is because the legislating is being done by a bunch of people who have lots and lots of care privilege.
And so, they assume since somebody is taking care of their kids at home, somebody is cooking their meals or washing their clothes so that they can go to work every day, they just assume that that type of informal, invisible family style structure exists for anybody who wants to go into the labor market and it just doesn’t. I lived a rat race with my kids between the time they were born and the time they entered school because it’s daunting taking care of a toddler and an infant while you’re working full-time in the federal government in DC with a bunch of type A style people. It’s like it’s a rat race.
And so, that for me, care privilege is just this idea of recognizing why it’s really challenging for us as a society sometimes to really create supports for people who have lots of care roles and responsibilities.
Paul Constant:
A little early in the program, usually at the end we ask the magic wand question, but I had a follow-up to that that I wanted to ask. So, if you could wave a magic wand and build an economy that actually counts the things your book argues we’ve been missing, how would it work differently? What would be different?
Misty Heggeness:
Yeah, so economic statistics would be more inclusive. We would really invest in time use surveys and we would be able to measure the amount of economic activity people do for non-pay within households and across households. We would invest in social policies that really gave families the flexibility and the choice to either decide whether they wanted to care for their own children in their home or they wanted to have their children be in a high quality affordable childcare. The way that I talk about this is there’s always this discussion that seemed to always get tripped up on and it has to do with cost and pricing. There’s no money in the budget to fund, for example, universal childcare.
And my response to that is that is, again, this is not a white slate or blank slate, whatever. It’s not a surmountable problem. And what happens is that we act as though it is. And so, I say this in the book, but in my lifetime, I’ve lived through two auto bailouts, a banking bailout, and during the pandemic, I lived through an airline bailout.
Goldy:
And right now, you’re living through a billionaire bailout.
Misty Heggeness:
Yes.
Goldy:
Well, we’re spending all this money on billionaires.
Misty Heggeness:
So, it’s about values and it’s about priorities. And this is the piece, again, where I think we need to be really upfront about this, that this is the way the world works and this is the way humans act and behave, and we need to think about that first and foremost within the context of economics. So, there’s really no reason why we can’t provide funds, prioritize early childhood education or childcare, universal childcare. And we’ve done it before in World War II with the Lanham Act, we provided universal childcare for moms so they could go in the manufacturing industries and make bonds and other weapons for the guys over in Europe. And that universal childcare was comprehensive.
Women would work 10, 12 hour shifts and their kids would be in high quality, safe childcare environments while they were working. So, we’ve done it before. We have infrastructure in this country, so it’s not rocket science. The infrastructure is we already have universal childcare today. It’s called our public school systems. And all you need to do is lower the age of public school systems to create an infrastructure for a childcare setting for younger kids. So, none of this is hard, but we make it seem so hard.
And part of the reason why we do that is because we’ve lived so long under these assumptions that this invisible labor that women do in families will always be there and we take it for granted and therefore we don’t prioritize fixing this problem. And women are in a real crunch today because their educational attainment is higher than it’s ever been before. Women are more likely to have careers than jobs. They look at younger generations of women, millennials and Gen Z, and they’re not necessarily sure they want to have kids, they’re partnering up later. All of this is because of a work-life balance issue that is solvable.
Goldy:
Right. Well, to quote one of Joan Robinson’s colleagues, or one of her coworkers, “Anything we can do, we can afford.”
Misty Heggeness:
That’s right.
Goldy:
As Cain’s told us.
Paul Constant:
So, I wanted to ask you, this is very speculative, but I bet you’ve thought about it. If economists did take all of this seriously about participation in care work and cultural power, how do you think that would change the way that we think about economic growth and shared prosperity? What would the outcomes be for that kind of a system?
Misty Heggeness:
Yeah. I mean, I think we would kind of go back to the mid 20th century style thinking about this in terms of not necessarily in the field of economics, but just in terms of valuing community output or valuing community investments. So, I think one of the biggest challenges today is we no longer value inputs and investments that we make at the community level. It’s like everybody is out for themselves. So, you think about some of the infrastructure that was developed in between during and after the World Wars where we have our interstate system. Now, anytime there’s a new highway built, what happens?
We’ve got to put the tollways on it and make people pay to keep it clean because there’s no money and or we’re just Don’t want people to have access to something unless they’re paying for it. And so, without recognizing the whole purpose of a taxation system is to redistribute wealth and create a more equitable community where we can all thrive.
Goldy:
I want to get back to that. I think you give the profession too much credit. You said it’s what? In terms of professors, full professors, it’s still about 80% male, but it’s more than that. It’s not just male, it’s overwhelmingly white men. And on top of that, white men who grew up in privilege, disproportionately more than any other field, these are people whose parents had graduate degrees or professional class degrees. It is unlike any other, I don’t know, science? Is it a science? Whatever. It’s unlike any other field, and yet it has so much impact on our culture. It is the least inclusive academic profession we have. And you see that throughout economics and the impact it has on our society.
So, I really enjoyed the way you point that out in the book, even if I didn’t recognize most of the lyrics and songs that you mentioned.
Misty Heggeness:
I mean, I think it’s a really important and really valid point. And maybe I do give my profession too much credit, but I’m a glass half full type of gal. I am hopeful. And just for every potential bad actor that exists in my profession that happens to be old white male, there’s another 10 or 15 or whatever of those same actors who actually do care a lot about the profession, who do care a lot about the next generation. Part of my purpose of writing this book is I consider myself a feminist, but I also consider my spouse a feminist. And I think he would also agree. And I think men and women need to work together to figure out these problems. And I think we need to be open to having these discussions.
And I think if we’re going to get any further along in this trajectory of thinking about equity and thinking about the role of women in the field of economics, women for a long time have been in the lane of feminist economics doing their own thing because they weren’t accepted into the profession. And I want to be a feminist economist who is in mainstream. That is what I think we need. I don’t want to have to live at the fringe of my discipline because I value these things. And I think it’s only women that values these things. We all need to value these things.
And so, that’s probably why I come off as rosier than maybe perhaps I should is because I’m really focused on wanting to have these discussions in the mainstream. And I think that’s how the field of economics is going to grow and improve itself is if we do it that way.
Paul Constant:
That’s fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Thank you for the book. I really loved the book. I especially loved the homo economicus passage really sort of opened my eyes in some ways. And Goldy loves musicals. So, if he had to listen to one Taylor Swift song, what would you recommend?
Goldy:
I’m sure I’ve heard the songs. I just wouldn’t know it was Taylor Swift.
Paul Constant:
Yeah. No, I know. But he’s into wordplay and musicals and things like that. So, I was wondering if he had a recommendation.
Misty Heggeness:
Here we go. Of course I do. The Last Great American Dynasty.
Paul Constant:
Thank you.
Misty Heggeness:
That is a song about Rebekah Harkness. Do you know who Rebekah Harkness is?
Goldy:
Yeah. Well, I do now because you mentioned it in the book.
Misty Heggeness:
Yes, yes. And if you like musicals, you can watch The Eras Tour Concert, her first iteration. She does a whole set on The Great American Dynasty. So, you can watch it as a musical if you like.
Goldy:
Okay. Thank you.
Paul Constant:
I love that song. That’s my favorite album of hers. Not that anybody asked, but yes.
Goldy:
Normally Nick gets to ask this, but since he’s not here, I’ll let you ask it, Paul, the final question.
Paul Constant:
Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. One final question. Why do you do this work?
Misty Heggeness:
That’s a great question. I do this work because I passionately love the discipline of economics and I passionately love being a woman. And I feel like I should be able to be proud about both of those things simultaneously and that that should be recognized. And I want other young women and men to enter into the profession for the same reasons.
Goldy:
You know, Paul, when I saw this book come my way, I was a little skeptical as you might imagine. And look, there’s a lot of great examples, as you mentioned at the top about the economic impact that Taylor Swift herself has had on the economy that having a Taylor Swift tour come to your town is like having the World Cup come through with all the economic activity it generates for the local economy. I mean, it’s really impressive. But what impressed me about the book was not those anecdotes, and certainly not the quotes from Taylor, which didn’t speak to me because the way it will speak to a lot of other readers.
But the way Misty managed to use this narrative frame to actually teach economics, it is, in many ways, if you read this book instead of Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, I think you would get a more useful understanding of how the economy works. And for a lot of reasons, she talked about in the interview how innovation is important to economists. Okay. Yeah. No, it isn’t. I mean, in terms of like art and culture that being innovative and you’d think it would be important to economists, now innovation, that’s exogenous. There’s nothing in the Orthodox model about where innovation comes from. It’s kind of important, sure, but it’s just a shock and then it upsets the equilibrium, then we reach a new equilibrium. But there’s no talk.
I mean, if you actually go to the textbook, it doesn’t tell you where innovation comes from. It spends very little time talking about that. Again, we had discussed at the top this idea of economic man. My God, the example she uses, it just really demonstrates how much of the problem in economics is that it focuses exclusively on men. And for all the reasons that Misty talks about, that these are people who are used to being taken care of. So, they don’t really value the care. She goes all the way back to Adam Smith, the fact that while he’s writing his books, he’s being taken care of by his mother.
He lives at home with his mom who cooks for him and cleans for him and makes clothes for him and really takes care of him his entire life. And that is not a one-off story. That is the great men throughout history, as she says in the book, actually, not a woman behind them, but a woman right beside them, doing all the things that allow them to get through life.
Paul Constant:
Yeah. I wonder if you did a survey of economists with families, how many of them refer to taking care of their children as babysitting?
Goldy:
And as you know, Paul, look, I think she’s saying this half full. She’s looking at economics and the progress that’s made. I will say there is a generational thing that has been going on. And I am a late boomer. I hate being described as a boomer. As I’ve said before, I think of myself as transgenerational that I’m an extern trapped inside the body of a boomer. But my sister, who’s two years older, definitely a boomer. I just want to be clear about that. But I’m a late boomer and I was raised in a pretty progressive, fairly feminist household in terms of values, in terms of what they taught us, but not in the way it was run. It was pretty traditional. My father was a doctor.
My mother was a school teacher who, throughout our childhood, worked part-time. And my father did, except for maybe ethic grill or making a sandwich now and then did none of the cooking, certainly did none of the cleaning. My mother took care of the house and yet we were raised to respect women as equals. I mean, we were taught that. And my sister went on to become a doctor. And so, while I didn’t grow up in a household that really valued the work of women, I was raised to value the work of women. And as you know, I’m a girl dad and I take the rights and welfare of women very seriously because I want that for my daughter. And I was also the primary caregiver for much of her childhood.
Not so great at the house cleaning part of the care economy, but I was pretty good at the cooking and the childcare side of it. So, you make progress. Maybe next… No, I raised her to be a slop, next generation. There won’t be much house care, but much housework either. So, it takes time. There’s this idea in the Old Testament about why the Israelites had to wander in the desert for 40 years after leaving Egypt. And that was to wait for the children of slavery to die. It’s this generational thing. Didn’t want to bring people with a mindset of slavery back into the promised land. And so, as a student of history, I see these things in generational terms.
So, yes, there is progress and there will be more progress. Even if our parents didn’t lead by example, they at least instilled us with the values that future generations can do a little bit better.
Paul Constant:
Oh my gosh. Hope again. Look at that. Hope out of the mouth of Goldy. It’s amazing. It’s a miracle. It’s a Taylor Swift miracle.
Goldy:
It couldn’t have happened without Taylor Swift too.
Paul Constant:
Exactly.
Goldy:
Again, though, I have to be clear. Raised a Philadelphia Eagles fan. I can’t accept the Chiefs fandom under any circumstance.
Paul Constant:
And you lost me. Yep.
Goldy:
Yeah, I know. There’s two things like my… Well, it could be worse. You could have become a Cowboys fan. So, I mean, two things I’ve always told my daughter, I’ll accept anything you want to be in life, any partner you choose. I don’t care except for two things. Can’t be a Republican, can’t be a Cowboys fan. With that, Paul, again, I think both of us recommend the book. And Paul makes a living recommending books and where can you find it, Paul?
Paul Constant:
You can find it at bookshop.org or your neighborhood local independent bookstore.
Goldy:
Oh, not the big online monopolist. And of course, we will provide-
Paul Constant:
If you must.
Goldy:
… a link in the show notes. And again, it’s Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy. And of course, there will be a link in the show notes.
Freddy:
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