What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Economics
Dr. Misty Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas and former Census Bureau economist, released an analysis last year showing that mothers with young children were leaving the workforce after pandemic-era gains. It was a wake-up call that women with young children had benefited from the remote work–friendly policies and that some of the changes made by the Trump administration, like sweeping federal layoffs, had hit women hardest.
Heggeness had used long-available data from the Current Population Survey for her analysis, but took a unique perspective to understand what was happening to women in particular. Now she’s published a book that does the same. In Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy, she replaces the economics discipline’s idea of a rational “Economic Man” with a rational “Economic Woman” to show how our economy is impacted by the care that women provide, the choices they make for their families, and their perseverance despite sexism and discrimination. And yes, her muse on this journey is Taylor Swift.
I spoke with Heggeness about why ideas presented with a girly aesthetic—the book’s cover is purple, and the title is presented as a friendship bracelet—can and should be taken seriously, as well as how to get more women into economics and why the backlash to women’s progress actually makes her hopeful.
Monica Potts: The book has a purple cover, and I think you even talk about Taylor Swift being a woman who likes cats and glitter. I wondered why it was important to you to write a serious economics book embracing this kind of girly aesthetic.
Misty Heggeness: I’m in a profession that is just so dominated by white-men-in-brown-loafer perspectives. If you go to the econ meetings, it’s just a sea of white men with khakis and brown loafers. There’s such a tradition in my profession to not want to stick out, to really fit within the mold that exists. And if you want to be taken seriously, that’s what you need to do.
And I’ll tell you, just generally, I do feel like some of the reaction I get out in the public, and within my academic networks and circles, is people taking me a little bit less seriously because of this book. For me, that’s one of the critiques of the profession—that in order to be taken seriously and to really be able to have a prominent voice within this field, you have to basically act like a man in the traditional sense.… One of the things that I love about Taylor is [that] she does very much act like a man in many instances. She’s very savvy with business. She’s totally willing to go in and think about revenge and how you can get back at somebody who’s wronged you. But she loves delicate, flowery things. So she loves glitter and sparkle. She loves pink and pastel colors. She has cats.… She doesn’t shy away from any of it—the stuff that makes her who she is and the stuff that makes her authentically her.… And I really just leaned into all of it because I want to change the larger environment.
M.P.: I also am wondering if you are hoping that some people who might not otherwise be drawn—especially some women—to a book about economics are brought in by the Taylor Swift connection. And if so, what do you hope it does for them?
M.H.: One hundred percent. One of my goals in my career and in my lifetime is to get more women into the field of economics. And so I gifted the book to my daughter’s high school girlfriends.… I also want as many men as possible to read this book, but it’s really important to me that young girls see themselves represented in my profession, and that they find hooks that attract them to the profession. And going into an Econ 101 class and talking about widgets is not an exciting concept for many.
M.P.: One of the things you do in the book is you outline the policy changes that have happened that have allowed people like Taylor Swift to rise to the top, but all the work that still needs to be done, policy-wise, to help support more women. And I’m wondering what you make of the policy moment and political moment we’re in now?
MH: I’ll say first that I think that the rise of the Trump administration and all of these chest-pounding, really loud men: It obviously has negative implications because of the level of incompetency that is being put into leadership positions today. But I also am not surprised that it happened. I think that the reason why it happened is because there is seismic shifting happening in terms of women’s power and women’s ability to inform and be in leadership positions and ascend. I think that this is a reaction to the fact that we were no longer staying in in the status quo.
M.P.: And that’s also part of the reason you shift from thinking of Economic Man to Economic Woman, right? To kind of internalize these things as rational policy choices, not just extra women’s issues.
M.H.: And also because I think in the field of economics, we’ve focused so heavily in modern economics on efficiency, and we really have done a disservice in terms of helping the larger society understand issues of initial endowments. And you know, if you’re born into a family in poverty, it’s not going to be as easy for you to pick yourself up by your bootstraps as it might be if you were born into a wealthy family. I think that women get this so much more than men because we’ve been ignored for so long within our economic statistics and economic foundations, so much of our labor isn’t accounted for.
M.P.: Speaking of that, Vice President JD Vance has talked about how he wants to see more babies in America. And at the same time, the Trump policies all make it harder for women to have careers and for people to have economic stability. What do you as an economist make of these kinds of contradictions?
MH: The JD Vances of the world, and the Trumps of the world, they really struggle with something that I call care privilege. Care privilege is: You are an able-bodied adult, but yet you have your care needs being met by other people. So somebody’s washing and ironing your clothes, somebody’s cooking your meals, somebody’s taking care of your children. And there’s a lot of folks with big amounts of care privilege on the Hill, as well. I think that they really struggle to understand the realities of the people who provide care in this society and in this world. When you are somebody who has lots of care privilege, and you don’t have to think about the hit you might have to take to your income for having children, or the hit you might have to take to your sleep, or your ability to have some leisure time … when you have lots of care privilege, you don’t think about those things and you don’t understand them. And so when you speak about things that are related to caregiving, like raising the next generation and having children, oftentimes what you’re saying misses the boat, because it’s very off-kilter from the realities of people who are actually providing care in society.
M.P.: Some of the things that you talk about as the things women need, or caregivers and mothers and women in general need, are things like universal childcare and paid family leave, and these are all things that I think people have been talking about for a long time. What gives you hope that these things will finally come to fruition?
M.H.: I’ll be really contrarian in saying this, but what gives me hope is that we live in a society that actually voted in Donald Trump for a second term in office. Because again, as I mentioned earlier, what that means to me is that something is happening with women in society today and around issues of equity and equality that is poking at the bear, enough that people who have traditionally had certain power structures behind them are now to the point where they’re uncomfortable enough that they’re trying to push back.
Claudia Golden [Nobel Prize–winning economist at Harvard University] put out this paper the day that she won the Nobel Prize; she published a working paper called “Why Women Won.” It was 2023, and it really didn’t feel like women had won. We’re having setbacks in reproductive rights, all this stuff, and now with all of the attacks on DEI and all these things, it doesn’t often today feel like women are winning. It feels like we’re moving backwards. But a lot of times, in order to move even further forwards, you need to take a tiny step back. And so I’m actually really hopeful.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity.