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Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy
A feminist romp through pop culture that illuminates how women impact and shape the economy.
Taylor Swift and Beyoncé aren’t just pop megastars. They are working women, whose astounding accomplishments defy patriarchal norms. And while not all women can be Rihanna or Dolly Parton or Reese Witherspoon, their successes help us understand the central role of everyday women in today’s economy.
Swiftynomics assesses the complex economic lives of American women. Drawing insights from pathbreakers like Taylor Swift, Misty Heggeness digs into the data revealing women’s hidden contributions and aspirations—the unexamined value they create by following their own ambitions. She confronts misconceptions about the roles women play in today’s economy by highlighting the abundance of productive activity occurring in their daily lives and acknowledging the barriers they still face.
Lighthearted but substantive, Swiftynomics explores critical reforms like paying caregivers for work on behalf of their families and collecting statistical documentation of gendered labor that currently goes unrecognized. Heggeness also offers advice for women so they can thrive in an economy that was not built for them.
Taylor Swift and Beyoncé aren’t just pop megastars. They are working women, whose astounding accomplishments defy patriarchal norms. And while not all women can be Rihanna or Dolly Parton or Reese Witherspoon, their successes help us understand the central role of everyday women in today’s economy.
Swiftynomics assesses the complex economic lives of American women. Drawing insights from pathbreakers like Taylor Swift, Misty Heggeness digs into the data revealing women’s hidden contributions and aspirations—the unexamined value they create by following their own ambitions. She confronts misconceptions about the roles women play in today’s economy by highlighting the abundance of productive activity occurring in their daily lives and acknowledging the barriers they still face.
Lighthearted but substantive, Swiftynomics explores critical reforms like paying caregivers for work on behalf of their families and collecting statistical documentation of gendered labor that currently goes unrecognized. Heggeness also offers advice for women so they can thrive in an economy that was not built for them.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published January 27, 2026
13 people are currently reading
180 people want to read
About the author
Misty L. Heggeness
3 books3 followersMisty L. Heggeness is a proud Swiftie and an economist who studies the intersection of gender, poverty, inequality, and the high-skilled workforce. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Economist, and Science—and has helped shape federal policy over the past decade.
She is the founder and co-director of the Kansas Population Center, an associate professor of economics and public affairs, and an associate research scientist at the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas.
She is also innovator and founder of The Care Board, a dashboard of economic statistics on care.
She is the founder and co-director of the Kansas Population Center, an associate professor of economics and public affairs, and an associate research scientist at the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas.
She is also innovator and founder of The Care Board, a dashboard of economic statistics on care.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 27, 2026
There were many important points made, and a couple of other famous female singers were mentioned, but trying to tie everything back to one person was limiting and felt forced. Perhaps dropping "Swiftynomics" and simply going with "How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy", then include a wider array of women throughout history that have leaned into the challenges they faced and how their efforts succeeded in moving the needle for future generations—or even modifying the title to focus specifically on the influential power of female musicians throughout history who have used their voice and belief in themselves to negotiate and succeed within the music industry and beyond—would have resulted in a smoother, more well-rounded read. I think trying to create a whole book on the struggles of women and framing it around Taylor Swift's career was ambitious and clever, and will surely attract the attention of Swifties, but the execution just didn't deliver.
University of California Press kindly provided me an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
University of California Press kindly provided me an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
November 16, 2025
A brilliant and beautifully written book about the profound impact of female mega talents like Taylor Swift on the economy. Women, own your economic power like Taylor, and your life will be immeasurably better!
February 1, 2026
Friendship Bracelets to Policy Blueprints: Why “Swiftynomics” Uses Pop Stardom to Expose the Real Rules of Work and Care
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Swiftynomics” is a book with an unruly premise and a disciplined agenda. Its author, an economist who writes with the gusto of a magazine essayist, uses Taylor Swift as both subject and structure: a living illustration of how women build value, protect it, lose it, and then, with the patience of someone rerecording an entire catalogue, take it back. The result is part cultural criticism, part care-economy manifesto, part history lesson, and part field guide for anyone who has ever been told that the things women organize, tolerate, and carry are “personal choices” rather than public design.
The easiest way to misunderstand this book is to assume it is simply about Swift’s GDP-adjacent impact: hotel bookings, resale platforms, friendship bracelets turned into micro-commerce, the traveling city of the “Eras Tour” and its economic wake. The author does cover that glittering terrain, but she treats it as an entry point, not the destination. Swift is a narrative lens that sharpens a larger argument: women have always been economic agents, yet the dominant stories and the dominant models keep rendering their labor partial, invisible, or sentimental.
The book borrows Swift’s own grammar of reinvention – eras, pivots, strategic withdrawals, returns with receipts – and turns it into a framework for women’s lives. The author’s key term is “mastermind,” a word Swifties recognize as a wink but that “Swiftynomics” insists we take seriously. To be a mastermind is to play the long game in a world that keeps asking you to accept the short one. Underestimation is not merely an insult in this telling; it is a recurring economic condition. The women who move through these pages do not simply “balance” or “have it all.” They plan, improvise, compromise, strategize, recalibrate, and sometimes burn out, then start again, because the system has been built to treat their endurance as an unpriced resource.
A central pleasure of “Swiftynomics” is its refusal to keep its influences separate. It can pivot from a fandom anecdote to labor-force participation, from a kitchen-table argument to a critique of macro models, from the anthropology of comment sections to the mechanics of a policy that “backfires” because it assumes men and women begin with the same endowments. The writing is eager to be read by non-economists, which means it favors clarity over academic throat-clearing and scenes over specification. That bias sometimes compresses nuance, but it also gives the book a decisive advantage over more timid nonfiction: it does not pretend its subject matter is sterile. It treats the economy as a story about time, bodies, households, and what a society chooses to subsidize.
The most persuasive chapters are the ones that treat care not as sentiment but as math. The author returns repeatedly to “buffers” – the formal and informal supports that make family life compatible with paid work. She argues that the United States modernized women’s opportunities in the labor market faster than it modernized the structures that make those opportunities livable. Prior generations widened educational access, fought for workplace rights, changed laws, and cracked open doors that had been bolted shut. But the deeper architecture of daily life – childcare, paid leave, flexible work without punishment, healthcare that does not function like a private luxury – lagged behind. Women entered a workplace built to imagine a worker without caregiving responsibilities, then were told to solve the mismatch through grit and better calendars.
The pandemic becomes, in this book, a brutally clarifying lab experiment. When schools closed and parents absorbed the extra shift, the author observed not only exhaustion but a national shrug. She recounts the rage of mothers who watched exemptions bend for certain businesses while families were expected to privately manage the mental, logistical, and economic fallout of remote schooling. The point is not nostalgia. The point is hierarchy: what the state rushed to protect, what it treated as a domestic inconvenience, and how quickly the burden defaulted back to women when institutions wobbled.
One of the book’s sharper insights is sociological rather than statistical: the insistence that parenting is private does not merely isolate families, it also rewrites gratitude into shame. When a neighbor helps, the help is framed as a burden; when a parent struggles, the struggle is framed as personal failure. The author’s diagnosis is that this is not a psychological quirk but an ideological inheritance. It is reinforced by policy choices like the 1970s veto of universal childcare and by a cultural story that treats caregiving as a moral identity rather than a shared civic project. In that story, “help” is generosity; it is never infrastructure. “Swiftynomics” wants to rename the problem: what families need is not sporadic kindness, but systems built for human lives.
If this sounds like familiar territory, it is because the book lives in conversation with a shelf of care-economy and gender-labor touchstones: “Fair Play,” “Holding It Together,” “Finding Time,” “Already Toast,” “Invisible Women,” and Claudia Goldin’s work on the career-family collision. But “Swiftynomics” is not merely a remix of that literature with a pop soundtrack. What it adds is pop-cultural immediacy and a knack for making abstraction feel like a lived scene. It is also cannier about persuasion than many books that share its politics. It understands that readers are not convinced by a moral scolding; they are convinced by recognition. A number becomes real when it is attached to a day, a household, a humiliation, a missed promotion, a postpartum body, a sick parent, a daycare waitlist.
When the author turns to political organization, she grows more hopeful without turning naïve. She describes the speed with which women can mobilize when a moment demands it: rapid-response Zoom calls, affinity groups turning community into infrastructure, fandom converting recognition into turnout mechanics. The subtext is clear: the tools exist; what’s missing is the willingness to treat care as a public good rather than a private hobby. In this section the book’s “we” can feel capacious, a coalition rather than a scold. The reader is invited into a modern form of civic life that is improvised, networked, emotionally fluent, and often led by women who have learned to build systems in the very places the state refuses to.
A late chapter on sports offers one of the book’s most concrete examples of institutional design. Kansas City Current’s purpose-built stadium becomes, in the author’s telling, an argument in architecture: spaces can be engineered to accommodate caregivers rather than treat them as afterthoughts. Breastfeeding rooms, sensory spaces, the presence of family life made visible instead of hidden. The point is not that sports will save us. The point is that environments can be built. Culture is not weather. It is a set of choices that become habitual, and then hard to see.
Celebrity, in this book, is not a distraction from politics and policy; it is a tutorial in strategy. The author’s most compelling celebrity case study is arguably not Swift but Beyoncé, whose 2016 “Daddy Lessons” backlash becomes a story about racialized gatekeeping disguised as genre purity. The book’s detour into Black cowboys and cowgirls is not decorative history. It is a demonstration of how power curates memory: who is allowed to belong, who is marketed as an anomaly, who is edited out and then blamed for not “being there.”
These chapters are energizing because they treat strategy as a craft rather than a mood. Reinvention, the author argues, does not mean erasing your past; it means minimizing what holds you back and building a future position that better fits your goals. It is here that Swift’s rerecordings become more than gossip. They are a case study in ownership, contracts, and the difference between being a revenue stream and being a rights holder. It is also here that the author’s Swiftian cadence – brisk, emphatic, motivational without (usually) turning saccharine – can feel like a pressure valve for the book’s heavier material. A reader is allowed, briefly, to feel the joy of someone outmaneuvering a structure designed to extract from her.
But the book is also at its most vulnerable here. Celebrity long games work partly because celebrities can afford time horizons and can survive periods of strategic silence. For an ordinary care worker, “play the long game” can sound like an instruction delivered to someone already holding two jobs and a mental load. The author knows this, and she tries to correct for it by pivoting back to policy. Still, the tension remains, and it is productive tension: individual strategy is not a substitute for structural change. If the book sometimes flirts with the fantasy that enough masterminds could individually outplay the system, it pulls itself back toward its own thesis. The point is not merely to survive. The point is to redesign the conditions of survival.
“Swiftynomics” is most rigorous when it insists that better narratives are not enough. We need measurement. We need statistics that count what has been treated as uncountable. Here the author introduces “The Care Board,” a project designed to quantify the economic contributions of care activities, from formal childcare and nursing home work to the unpaid labor of household maintenance. The plea is methodological as much as moral: if you do not measure an economy, you do not govern it well. If care is invisible to data, it becomes invisible to urgency, and if it is invisible to urgency, it becomes invisible to budgets.
This is also where the book leans on its personified abstraction: “Economic Man” versus “Economic Woman.” It is a useful heuristic, a way to dramatize what standard models omit. But like all binaries, it can flatten. At times “Economic Man” becomes a straw figure for every institutional failure, and the reader may crave more attention to the many women who enforce the same norms, or to the ways class and race rearrange the burdens inside “women’s work.” When the book does broaden its lens, it is often through the texture of lived example: who can pay for help, who can’t; whose job tolerates flexibility, whose doesn’t; whose fatigue is treated as a private weakness, whose is treated as proof of commitment. The book is strongest when it shows how “choice” often looks like triage.
In the conclusion, the book reaches its most explicitly political material. The author frames the overturning of Roe v. Wade as an economic story as well as a legal one: restrictions on reproductive autonomy shift costs and life trajectories in gendered ways. Children require resources. In a society that tolerates men’s ability to evade the costs of unintended parenthood, the removal of reproductive choice functions as a redistribution of risk onto women. The author’s point is not that everything is economics; it is that economics shows you who is forced to pay.
From there the book becomes a policy menu, and here it can feel, depending on your temperament, either bracing or breathless. The author calls for paying parents for invisible labor via robust child credits delivered monthly, universal paid parental leave with “use-it-or-lose-it” paternity provisions, universal affordable childcare, investments in before- and after-school care, flexible work rules that do not sabotage advancement, and a national dashboard that makes the care economy legible. She anticipates familiar objections about cost and “incentives,” and answers with a quiet dare: if the state can mobilize vast sums for banks, industries, and crises that threaten capital, why does it suddenly become allergic to investment when the beneficiaries are families?
This is where the book’s tone becomes more exhortative: vote, organize, stop accepting the bargain of perpetual overwork. There is rhetorical satisfaction in that pivot, and also strain. A reader may wish for more acknowledgement of political constraints, of how policy becomes law, of how backlash weaponizes “family values” to keep the care burden right where it is. But the book’s impatience is also part of its identity. It wants to move the reader from recognition to agency, and it prefers to risk being too direct rather than remain decorously academic while households quietly fracture.
The afterword is among the book’s most affecting sections. It shifts into herstory: grandmothers whose labor appears as gardens and holiday treats; a mother who bought a 1968 Mercury Cougar with her own wages and later divorced in an era that punished women for doing so; an obituary that reads like a résumé, proof that a woman wanted to be seen for contributions beyond her home. There is even the haunting story of a distant ancestor, Lisbet Nypan, accused of witchcraft for healing with herbs and prayer – punished, in effect, for the crime of being useful outside sanctioned channels. These stories are not mere ornament. They are the book’s closing proof that women’s work has always been economic, whether or not the official record acknowledged it.
This coda also clarifies the author’s voice. “Swiftynomics” is not written from a remove. It is written by someone who has done the commute with cranky children, who has felt the mathematical dread of a single income in an expensive city, who knows the motherhood penalty not as theory but as a shadow over lifetime earnings. The intimacy is an asset even when it occasionally leads the author to overreach. It explains, too, the gratitude in the acknowledgments: a lineage of women scholars and editors, including Nancy Folbre, appear not as prestige name-drops but as evidence of a community that made this kind of crossover book possible.
A small, delightful detail, and one that signals the book’s care for symbolism: the cover’s friendship-bracelet inspiration, and the use of Adobe Caslon, a typeface redrawn and digitized by Carol Twombly for Adobe in the 1980s. It is the kind of fact that would be trivial if the book were superficial, but here it lands as a quiet thematic rhyme. Women’s fingerprints are everywhere in the infrastructure of culture. We simply do not train ourselves to look.
“Swiftynomics” wants you to look, and then it wants you to act. Its method is to translate private fatigue into public structure, to reframe “help” as “infrastructure,” to turn a pop phenomenon into a language for policy. It sometimes hurries, sometimes sermonizes, and occasionally asks Taylor Swift to carry more argumentative weight than any single cultural figure should. But it is also lively, learned, and unexpectedly tender toward the reader, not because it promises you can transcend systems by positive thinking, but because it insists you are not imagining the burden. The burden has a shape. It has a cost. It has a history. And it can, with enough will and enough data and enough collective insistence, be redesigned.
I’d place “Swiftynomics” at 86 out of 100: an accessible, idea-dense work whose best pages make the economy feel newly visible, and whose weaker moments reveal the strain of trying to build a coalition out of both fandom and frustration. By the end, the book earns its own Swiftian flourish. Losing things doesn’t just mean losing. Sometimes it means gaining the vocabulary to demand them back.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Swiftynomics” is a book with an unruly premise and a disciplined agenda. Its author, an economist who writes with the gusto of a magazine essayist, uses Taylor Swift as both subject and structure: a living illustration of how women build value, protect it, lose it, and then, with the patience of someone rerecording an entire catalogue, take it back. The result is part cultural criticism, part care-economy manifesto, part history lesson, and part field guide for anyone who has ever been told that the things women organize, tolerate, and carry are “personal choices” rather than public design.
The easiest way to misunderstand this book is to assume it is simply about Swift’s GDP-adjacent impact: hotel bookings, resale platforms, friendship bracelets turned into micro-commerce, the traveling city of the “Eras Tour” and its economic wake. The author does cover that glittering terrain, but she treats it as an entry point, not the destination. Swift is a narrative lens that sharpens a larger argument: women have always been economic agents, yet the dominant stories and the dominant models keep rendering their labor partial, invisible, or sentimental.
The book borrows Swift’s own grammar of reinvention – eras, pivots, strategic withdrawals, returns with receipts – and turns it into a framework for women’s lives. The author’s key term is “mastermind,” a word Swifties recognize as a wink but that “Swiftynomics” insists we take seriously. To be a mastermind is to play the long game in a world that keeps asking you to accept the short one. Underestimation is not merely an insult in this telling; it is a recurring economic condition. The women who move through these pages do not simply “balance” or “have it all.” They plan, improvise, compromise, strategize, recalibrate, and sometimes burn out, then start again, because the system has been built to treat their endurance as an unpriced resource.
A central pleasure of “Swiftynomics” is its refusal to keep its influences separate. It can pivot from a fandom anecdote to labor-force participation, from a kitchen-table argument to a critique of macro models, from the anthropology of comment sections to the mechanics of a policy that “backfires” because it assumes men and women begin with the same endowments. The writing is eager to be read by non-economists, which means it favors clarity over academic throat-clearing and scenes over specification. That bias sometimes compresses nuance, but it also gives the book a decisive advantage over more timid nonfiction: it does not pretend its subject matter is sterile. It treats the economy as a story about time, bodies, households, and what a society chooses to subsidize.
The most persuasive chapters are the ones that treat care not as sentiment but as math. The author returns repeatedly to “buffers” – the formal and informal supports that make family life compatible with paid work. She argues that the United States modernized women’s opportunities in the labor market faster than it modernized the structures that make those opportunities livable. Prior generations widened educational access, fought for workplace rights, changed laws, and cracked open doors that had been bolted shut. But the deeper architecture of daily life – childcare, paid leave, flexible work without punishment, healthcare that does not function like a private luxury – lagged behind. Women entered a workplace built to imagine a worker without caregiving responsibilities, then were told to solve the mismatch through grit and better calendars.
The pandemic becomes, in this book, a brutally clarifying lab experiment. When schools closed and parents absorbed the extra shift, the author observed not only exhaustion but a national shrug. She recounts the rage of mothers who watched exemptions bend for certain businesses while families were expected to privately manage the mental, logistical, and economic fallout of remote schooling. The point is not nostalgia. The point is hierarchy: what the state rushed to protect, what it treated as a domestic inconvenience, and how quickly the burden defaulted back to women when institutions wobbled.
One of the book’s sharper insights is sociological rather than statistical: the insistence that parenting is private does not merely isolate families, it also rewrites gratitude into shame. When a neighbor helps, the help is framed as a burden; when a parent struggles, the struggle is framed as personal failure. The author’s diagnosis is that this is not a psychological quirk but an ideological inheritance. It is reinforced by policy choices like the 1970s veto of universal childcare and by a cultural story that treats caregiving as a moral identity rather than a shared civic project. In that story, “help” is generosity; it is never infrastructure. “Swiftynomics” wants to rename the problem: what families need is not sporadic kindness, but systems built for human lives.
If this sounds like familiar territory, it is because the book lives in conversation with a shelf of care-economy and gender-labor touchstones: “Fair Play,” “Holding It Together,” “Finding Time,” “Already Toast,” “Invisible Women,” and Claudia Goldin’s work on the career-family collision. But “Swiftynomics” is not merely a remix of that literature with a pop soundtrack. What it adds is pop-cultural immediacy and a knack for making abstraction feel like a lived scene. It is also cannier about persuasion than many books that share its politics. It understands that readers are not convinced by a moral scolding; they are convinced by recognition. A number becomes real when it is attached to a day, a household, a humiliation, a missed promotion, a postpartum body, a sick parent, a daycare waitlist.
When the author turns to political organization, she grows more hopeful without turning naïve. She describes the speed with which women can mobilize when a moment demands it: rapid-response Zoom calls, affinity groups turning community into infrastructure, fandom converting recognition into turnout mechanics. The subtext is clear: the tools exist; what’s missing is the willingness to treat care as a public good rather than a private hobby. In this section the book’s “we” can feel capacious, a coalition rather than a scold. The reader is invited into a modern form of civic life that is improvised, networked, emotionally fluent, and often led by women who have learned to build systems in the very places the state refuses to.
A late chapter on sports offers one of the book’s most concrete examples of institutional design. Kansas City Current’s purpose-built stadium becomes, in the author’s telling, an argument in architecture: spaces can be engineered to accommodate caregivers rather than treat them as afterthoughts. Breastfeeding rooms, sensory spaces, the presence of family life made visible instead of hidden. The point is not that sports will save us. The point is that environments can be built. Culture is not weather. It is a set of choices that become habitual, and then hard to see.
Celebrity, in this book, is not a distraction from politics and policy; it is a tutorial in strategy. The author’s most compelling celebrity case study is arguably not Swift but Beyoncé, whose 2016 “Daddy Lessons” backlash becomes a story about racialized gatekeeping disguised as genre purity. The book’s detour into Black cowboys and cowgirls is not decorative history. It is a demonstration of how power curates memory: who is allowed to belong, who is marketed as an anomaly, who is edited out and then blamed for not “being there.”
These chapters are energizing because they treat strategy as a craft rather than a mood. Reinvention, the author argues, does not mean erasing your past; it means minimizing what holds you back and building a future position that better fits your goals. It is here that Swift’s rerecordings become more than gossip. They are a case study in ownership, contracts, and the difference between being a revenue stream and being a rights holder. It is also here that the author’s Swiftian cadence – brisk, emphatic, motivational without (usually) turning saccharine – can feel like a pressure valve for the book’s heavier material. A reader is allowed, briefly, to feel the joy of someone outmaneuvering a structure designed to extract from her.
But the book is also at its most vulnerable here. Celebrity long games work partly because celebrities can afford time horizons and can survive periods of strategic silence. For an ordinary care worker, “play the long game” can sound like an instruction delivered to someone already holding two jobs and a mental load. The author knows this, and she tries to correct for it by pivoting back to policy. Still, the tension remains, and it is productive tension: individual strategy is not a substitute for structural change. If the book sometimes flirts with the fantasy that enough masterminds could individually outplay the system, it pulls itself back toward its own thesis. The point is not merely to survive. The point is to redesign the conditions of survival.
“Swiftynomics” is most rigorous when it insists that better narratives are not enough. We need measurement. We need statistics that count what has been treated as uncountable. Here the author introduces “The Care Board,” a project designed to quantify the economic contributions of care activities, from formal childcare and nursing home work to the unpaid labor of household maintenance. The plea is methodological as much as moral: if you do not measure an economy, you do not govern it well. If care is invisible to data, it becomes invisible to urgency, and if it is invisible to urgency, it becomes invisible to budgets.
This is also where the book leans on its personified abstraction: “Economic Man” versus “Economic Woman.” It is a useful heuristic, a way to dramatize what standard models omit. But like all binaries, it can flatten. At times “Economic Man” becomes a straw figure for every institutional failure, and the reader may crave more attention to the many women who enforce the same norms, or to the ways class and race rearrange the burdens inside “women’s work.” When the book does broaden its lens, it is often through the texture of lived example: who can pay for help, who can’t; whose job tolerates flexibility, whose doesn’t; whose fatigue is treated as a private weakness, whose is treated as proof of commitment. The book is strongest when it shows how “choice” often looks like triage.
In the conclusion, the book reaches its most explicitly political material. The author frames the overturning of Roe v. Wade as an economic story as well as a legal one: restrictions on reproductive autonomy shift costs and life trajectories in gendered ways. Children require resources. In a society that tolerates men’s ability to evade the costs of unintended parenthood, the removal of reproductive choice functions as a redistribution of risk onto women. The author’s point is not that everything is economics; it is that economics shows you who is forced to pay.
From there the book becomes a policy menu, and here it can feel, depending on your temperament, either bracing or breathless. The author calls for paying parents for invisible labor via robust child credits delivered monthly, universal paid parental leave with “use-it-or-lose-it” paternity provisions, universal affordable childcare, investments in before- and after-school care, flexible work rules that do not sabotage advancement, and a national dashboard that makes the care economy legible. She anticipates familiar objections about cost and “incentives,” and answers with a quiet dare: if the state can mobilize vast sums for banks, industries, and crises that threaten capital, why does it suddenly become allergic to investment when the beneficiaries are families?
This is where the book’s tone becomes more exhortative: vote, organize, stop accepting the bargain of perpetual overwork. There is rhetorical satisfaction in that pivot, and also strain. A reader may wish for more acknowledgement of political constraints, of how policy becomes law, of how backlash weaponizes “family values” to keep the care burden right where it is. But the book’s impatience is also part of its identity. It wants to move the reader from recognition to agency, and it prefers to risk being too direct rather than remain decorously academic while households quietly fracture.
The afterword is among the book’s most affecting sections. It shifts into herstory: grandmothers whose labor appears as gardens and holiday treats; a mother who bought a 1968 Mercury Cougar with her own wages and later divorced in an era that punished women for doing so; an obituary that reads like a résumé, proof that a woman wanted to be seen for contributions beyond her home. There is even the haunting story of a distant ancestor, Lisbet Nypan, accused of witchcraft for healing with herbs and prayer – punished, in effect, for the crime of being useful outside sanctioned channels. These stories are not mere ornament. They are the book’s closing proof that women’s work has always been economic, whether or not the official record acknowledged it.
This coda also clarifies the author’s voice. “Swiftynomics” is not written from a remove. It is written by someone who has done the commute with cranky children, who has felt the mathematical dread of a single income in an expensive city, who knows the motherhood penalty not as theory but as a shadow over lifetime earnings. The intimacy is an asset even when it occasionally leads the author to overreach. It explains, too, the gratitude in the acknowledgments: a lineage of women scholars and editors, including Nancy Folbre, appear not as prestige name-drops but as evidence of a community that made this kind of crossover book possible.
A small, delightful detail, and one that signals the book’s care for symbolism: the cover’s friendship-bracelet inspiration, and the use of Adobe Caslon, a typeface redrawn and digitized by Carol Twombly for Adobe in the 1980s. It is the kind of fact that would be trivial if the book were superficial, but here it lands as a quiet thematic rhyme. Women’s fingerprints are everywhere in the infrastructure of culture. We simply do not train ourselves to look.
“Swiftynomics” wants you to look, and then it wants you to act. Its method is to translate private fatigue into public structure, to reframe “help” as “infrastructure,” to turn a pop phenomenon into a language for policy. It sometimes hurries, sometimes sermonizes, and occasionally asks Taylor Swift to carry more argumentative weight than any single cultural figure should. But it is also lively, learned, and unexpectedly tender toward the reader, not because it promises you can transcend systems by positive thinking, but because it insists you are not imagining the burden. The burden has a shape. It has a cost. It has a history. And it can, with enough will and enough data and enough collective insistence, be redesigned.
I’d place “Swiftynomics” at 86 out of 100: an accessible, idea-dense work whose best pages make the economy feel newly visible, and whose weaker moments reveal the strain of trying to build a coalition out of both fandom and frustration. By the end, the book earns its own Swiftian flourish. Losing things doesn’t just mean losing. Sometimes it means gaining the vocabulary to demand them back.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3 Stars
I did not love this book, but I think there are plenty of other readers who will like this more than me (particularly anyone who is a Taylor Swift fan). On the positive side, I think this book is very accessible and unique, and it tackles important discussions about women's contributions to the economy. The writing was satisfactory and easy to understand. If you're looking for a feminist and empowering economics read, this book may be perfect for you.
Positives aside, I found the quality and arguments of this book suffered for trying to spotlight Taylor Swift as much as it did. The structure did not work well - it was at times clunky (like the chapter on motherhood, which essentially was introduced by saying Taylor Swift has a mother, so let's talk about mothers). The segment headers were all Taylor Swift song titles, which broke up the flow of the book and felt a bit forced.
While other female singers and pop culture hits were mentioned (including Beyonce, Madonna, and the Barbie movie), it truly was the Taylor Swift show in this book, and that framing minimized the success of women that came before her. Furthermore, I think there are several areas this book failed to confront issues due to the Taylor Swift framing. For instance, the author advocates for more government support of women and mentions Taylor Swift's status as a billionaire without making the connection that the existence of billionaires is inherently problematic - the taxes that billionaires should be paying has the potential to help women at all levels.
Additionally, because Taylor Swift is white, this book has a decidedly white perspective. I would have been interested to hear more about different groups of women, but it feels like that diversity of perspective was missed in this book.
Lastly, on the topic of politics, Taylor Swift is portrayed as a person who is always forthcoming about her politics and inherently supportive of women's rights. Her decision to vote for Kamala Harris was portrayed as an unforced public announcement (when in fact, Taylor Swift announced her endorsement to counteract deep fake videos of her endorsing Trump). Details like this made it feel as though the author could not or was not willing to say anything remotely negative about Taylor Swift, to the detriment of her overall argument.
While I am happy this book exists, and I hope that it finds its audience, I think there was a lot of room for improvement here. I think the book would've been much stronger had one chapter focused on the positive economic impacts of the Era's tour, and then delved into other topics using other powerhouse women to anchor the author's arguments. To focus so thoroughly on a single person diminishes the diversity of women and their unique contributions to the economy.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for early access to this arc. These opinions are my own.
I did not love this book, but I think there are plenty of other readers who will like this more than me (particularly anyone who is a Taylor Swift fan). On the positive side, I think this book is very accessible and unique, and it tackles important discussions about women's contributions to the economy. The writing was satisfactory and easy to understand. If you're looking for a feminist and empowering economics read, this book may be perfect for you.
Positives aside, I found the quality and arguments of this book suffered for trying to spotlight Taylor Swift as much as it did. The structure did not work well - it was at times clunky (like the chapter on motherhood, which essentially was introduced by saying Taylor Swift has a mother, so let's talk about mothers). The segment headers were all Taylor Swift song titles, which broke up the flow of the book and felt a bit forced.
While other female singers and pop culture hits were mentioned (including Beyonce, Madonna, and the Barbie movie), it truly was the Taylor Swift show in this book, and that framing minimized the success of women that came before her. Furthermore, I think there are several areas this book failed to confront issues due to the Taylor Swift framing. For instance, the author advocates for more government support of women and mentions Taylor Swift's status as a billionaire without making the connection that the existence of billionaires is inherently problematic - the taxes that billionaires should be paying has the potential to help women at all levels.
Additionally, because Taylor Swift is white, this book has a decidedly white perspective. I would have been interested to hear more about different groups of women, but it feels like that diversity of perspective was missed in this book.
Lastly, on the topic of politics, Taylor Swift is portrayed as a person who is always forthcoming about her politics and inherently supportive of women's rights. Her decision to vote for Kamala Harris was portrayed as an unforced public announcement (when in fact, Taylor Swift announced her endorsement to counteract deep fake videos of her endorsing Trump). Details like this made it feel as though the author could not or was not willing to say anything remotely negative about Taylor Swift, to the detriment of her overall argument.
While I am happy this book exists, and I hope that it finds its audience, I think there was a lot of room for improvement here. I think the book would've been much stronger had one chapter focused on the positive economic impacts of the Era's tour, and then delved into other topics using other powerhouse women to anchor the author's arguments. To focus so thoroughly on a single person diminishes the diversity of women and their unique contributions to the economy.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for early access to this arc. These opinions are my own.
Want to read
January 26, 2026I didn’t expect Swiftynomics to linger with me the way it has. I initially picked it up because the pop culture framing sounded accessible, maybe even a little fun, but the book turned out to be far more thoughtful and quietly unsettling than I anticipated. This isn’t a book you breeze through and forget. It’s one that keeps resurfacing in your thoughts days after you finish it.
What struck me early on was how deliberately the author avoids treating women’s economic lives as anomalies. So often, discussions about women and work feel like side conversations, exceptions to a male default. Here, women’s experiences are treated as central, not supplementary. That shift alone changes how the entire argument unfolds.
The celebrity examples work because they’re familiar reference points, not because they’re aspirational. Taylor Swift isn’t held up as a template to emulate, but as a lens through which broader systems become visible. From there, the book widens its scope to include women whose names will never trend, but whose labor sustains families, communities, and industries.
The chapters on invisible labor hit hardest for me. Not because the concept was new, but because it was articulated so clearly and without judgment. The book doesn’t scold women for overextending themselves, nor does it romanticize sacrifice. It simply names the cost, and that naming feels radical in its honesty.
I finished this book feeling both validated and sobered. Validated because so much of what I’ve felt privately was reflected back to me. Sobered because recognizing the problem doesn’t automatically solve it. Still, Swiftynomics offers something rare: clarity without cynicism.
What struck me early on was how deliberately the author avoids treating women’s economic lives as anomalies. So often, discussions about women and work feel like side conversations, exceptions to a male default. Here, women’s experiences are treated as central, not supplementary. That shift alone changes how the entire argument unfolds.
The celebrity examples work because they’re familiar reference points, not because they’re aspirational. Taylor Swift isn’t held up as a template to emulate, but as a lens through which broader systems become visible. From there, the book widens its scope to include women whose names will never trend, but whose labor sustains families, communities, and industries.
The chapters on invisible labor hit hardest for me. Not because the concept was new, but because it was articulated so clearly and without judgment. The book doesn’t scold women for overextending themselves, nor does it romanticize sacrifice. It simply names the cost, and that naming feels radical in its honesty.
I finished this book feeling both validated and sobered. Validated because so much of what I’ve felt privately was reflected back to me. Sobered because recognizing the problem doesn’t automatically solve it. Still, Swiftynomics offers something rare: clarity without cynicism.
January 27, 2026
I was wary of the pop-culture hook at first. Books that lean on celebrity narratives can sometimes feel superficial, as though fame alone explains success. Swiftynomics avoids that trap entirely. The famous figures are not presented as exceptions who “made it,” but as case studies that expose how gendered expectations shape economic outcomes, even at the highest levels.
What makes this book stand out is its refusal to individualize systemic problems. There’s no implication that women simply need to work harder, brand themselves better, or make smarter choices. Instead, the focus remains firmly on how the economy itself is structured, and who it was designed to serve.
I found the discussion of ambition particularly refreshing. Women’s ambition is often framed as something to be managed, softened, or justified. Here, it’s treated as a productive force that creates real value, even when it doesn’t conform neatly to traditional career paths.
The writing is calm, confident, and measured. There’s no performative outrage, which makes the critique land even more strongly. The book trusts the reader to sit with complexity rather than offering neat conclusions.
By the time I finished, I felt like I had a clearer framework for understanding my own professional choices, and why so many of them have felt constrained despite effort and intention. That clarity alone made this a meaningful read for me.
What makes this book stand out is its refusal to individualize systemic problems. There’s no implication that women simply need to work harder, brand themselves better, or make smarter choices. Instead, the focus remains firmly on how the economy itself is structured, and who it was designed to serve.
I found the discussion of ambition particularly refreshing. Women’s ambition is often framed as something to be managed, softened, or justified. Here, it’s treated as a productive force that creates real value, even when it doesn’t conform neatly to traditional career paths.
The writing is calm, confident, and measured. There’s no performative outrage, which makes the critique land even more strongly. The book trusts the reader to sit with complexity rather than offering neat conclusions.
By the time I finished, I felt like I had a clearer framework for understanding my own professional choices, and why so many of them have felt constrained despite effort and intention. That clarity alone made this a meaningful read for me.
February 4, 2026
Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy is an insightful, engaging, and refreshingly accessible examination of how women shape and are too often excluded from the way we understand economic value.
Misty L. Heggeness succeeds in translating complex economic realities into a narrative that feels both grounded and energizing. By weaving pop culture figures like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Dolly Parton into rigorous data analysis, the book makes a compelling case for rethinking what counts as “productive” work. These examples are not treated as celebrity exceptions, but as entry points into understanding the broader, often invisible labor performed by everyday women.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its balance of tone. It is lighthearted without being superficial, and substantive without becoming inaccessible. Heggeness clearly articulates how caregiving, unpaid labor, and gendered expectations distort economic metrics, while also addressing the systemic barriers women continue to face. The discussion of policy reform particularly around recognizing and compensating care work is both practical and thought provoking.
Smart, timely, and empowering, Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy will resonate with readers interested in feminism, economics, public policy, and cultural analysis. It’s a book that not only reframes the conversation, but invites readers to imagine a fairer and more accurate economic future.
Misty L. Heggeness succeeds in translating complex economic realities into a narrative that feels both grounded and energizing. By weaving pop culture figures like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Dolly Parton into rigorous data analysis, the book makes a compelling case for rethinking what counts as “productive” work. These examples are not treated as celebrity exceptions, but as entry points into understanding the broader, often invisible labor performed by everyday women.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its balance of tone. It is lighthearted without being superficial, and substantive without becoming inaccessible. Heggeness clearly articulates how caregiving, unpaid labor, and gendered expectations distort economic metrics, while also addressing the systemic barriers women continue to face. The discussion of policy reform particularly around recognizing and compensating care work is both practical and thought provoking.
Smart, timely, and empowering, Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy will resonate with readers interested in feminism, economics, public policy, and cultural analysis. It’s a book that not only reframes the conversation, but invites readers to imagine a fairer and more accurate economic future.
January 27, 2026
This book took me longer to read than I expected, not because it was dense, but because I kept stopping to think. Swiftynomics has a way of reframing ordinary experiences in ways that make you pause and reconsider assumptions you didn’t realize you were carrying.
I appreciated how the author grounds her analysis in real data without allowing the book to become overly academic. The statistics support the narrative rather than dominating it. You never feel like you’re being lectured, which makes the arguments easier to engage with, even when they’re challenging.
One of the strongest aspects of the book is its discussion of caregiving. The way caregiving labor is simultaneously essential and devalued is something many of us understand intuitively, but seeing it unpacked economically gave me new language for old frustrations. It also made me reflect on how often society frames these choices as personal preferences rather than structural necessities.
Not every chapter resonated equally with me, and there were moments where I wanted the analysis to go even deeper. Still, the overall arc of the book is compelling and coherent. By the end, the message is hard to dismiss.
This is the kind of book that benefits from discussion. I’d love to hear how readers from different stages of life respond to it, because I suspect everyone will see something different reflected back.
I appreciated how the author grounds her analysis in real data without allowing the book to become overly academic. The statistics support the narrative rather than dominating it. You never feel like you’re being lectured, which makes the arguments easier to engage with, even when they’re challenging.
One of the strongest aspects of the book is its discussion of caregiving. The way caregiving labor is simultaneously essential and devalued is something many of us understand intuitively, but seeing it unpacked economically gave me new language for old frustrations. It also made me reflect on how often society frames these choices as personal preferences rather than structural necessities.
Not every chapter resonated equally with me, and there were moments where I wanted the analysis to go even deeper. Still, the overall arc of the book is compelling and coherent. By the end, the message is hard to dismiss.
This is the kind of book that benefits from discussion. I’d love to hear how readers from different stages of life respond to it, because I suspect everyone will see something different reflected back.
January 27, 2026
Swiftynomics is the kind of book that quietly rearranges your thinking. It doesn’t demand agreement, but it does make it difficult to return to old assumptions unchanged. I found myself reconsidering how often women’s economic contributions are discussed only in relation to outcomes, not effort or context.
The book does an excellent job of connecting individual stories to broader patterns. Personal experience is never treated as anecdotal evidence to be dismissed, but as data that deserves attention. That perspective feels especially important in conversations about gender and labor, where lived experience is often minimized.
I was particularly struck by the discussion of time, how women’s time is fragmented, borrowed, and undervalued. It’s something many of us experience daily, yet rarely analyze economically. Seeing it framed this way made me more aware of how deeply time inequality shapes opportunity.
While I occasionally wished for more concrete policy exploration, I understand why the book prioritizes analysis over prescription. Its strength lies in making the invisible visible, not pretending to offer easy fixes.
Overall, this is a thoughtful and engaging read that rewards attention and reflection.
The book does an excellent job of connecting individual stories to broader patterns. Personal experience is never treated as anecdotal evidence to be dismissed, but as data that deserves attention. That perspective feels especially important in conversations about gender and labor, where lived experience is often minimized.
I was particularly struck by the discussion of time, how women’s time is fragmented, borrowed, and undervalued. It’s something many of us experience daily, yet rarely analyze economically. Seeing it framed this way made me more aware of how deeply time inequality shapes opportunity.
While I occasionally wished for more concrete policy exploration, I understand why the book prioritizes analysis over prescription. Its strength lies in making the invisible visible, not pretending to offer easy fixes.
Overall, this is a thoughtful and engaging read that rewards attention and reflection.
February 1, 2026
Reading this book felt like someone finally articulating thoughts I’ve carried for years without language. Swiftynomics doesn’t just explain how women participate in the economy, it insists that their participation has always mattered, even when it hasn’t been acknowledged.
What I appreciated most was the absence of judgment. There’s no ranking of choices, no implication that certain paths are more legitimate than others. Instead, the book examines how constraints shape decisions and how those decisions still generate value, even when they don’t lead to traditional markers of success.
The caregiving sections were particularly resonant. They capture the emotional and economic complexity of caring for others without sentimentalizing it. Caregiving is presented as work, real, necessary, and costly, not as a moral obligation women should absorb quietly.
This book also made me more aware of how narratives around “success” are constructed. Whose success is celebrated? Whose labor is assumed? These questions linger long after the final chapter.
I closed the book feeling less alone in my frustrations and more convinced that the conversation needs to change.
What I appreciated most was the absence of judgment. There’s no ranking of choices, no implication that certain paths are more legitimate than others. Instead, the book examines how constraints shape decisions and how those decisions still generate value, even when they don’t lead to traditional markers of success.
The caregiving sections were particularly resonant. They capture the emotional and economic complexity of caring for others without sentimentalizing it. Caregiving is presented as work, real, necessary, and costly, not as a moral obligation women should absorb quietly.
This book also made me more aware of how narratives around “success” are constructed. Whose success is celebrated? Whose labor is assumed? These questions linger long after the final chapter.
I closed the book feeling less alone in my frustrations and more convinced that the conversation needs to change.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley!
As a huge Swiftie, I loved this and, as someone who reads a lot of activism related literature, a lot of the information included in this book wasn't very new to me. However, that does not detract from Ms. Heggeness writing a book that centered women in the economic sphere while consistently tying in fandom and doing it well.
I attended the Eras tour, as did many of my friends, and just my small friend group of Swifties alone easily contributed thousands of dollars to the phenomenon that is the Eras tour. Never had women had so much access to income as they have in recent years and I loved seeing how Heggeness showed us that that income heavily impacts our economy, locally and internationally, and always has, but hasn't been documented.
I was given the opportunity to read this title by NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
As a huge Swiftie, I loved this and, as someone who reads a lot of activism related literature, a lot of the information included in this book wasn't very new to me. However, that does not detract from Ms. Heggeness writing a book that centered women in the economic sphere while consistently tying in fandom and doing it well.
I attended the Eras tour, as did many of my friends, and just my small friend group of Swifties alone easily contributed thousands of dollars to the phenomenon that is the Eras tour. Never had women had so much access to income as they have in recent years and I loved seeing how Heggeness showed us that that income heavily impacts our economy, locally and internationally, and always has, but hasn't been documented.
I was given the opportunity to read this title by NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.
February 1, 2026
What makes Swiftynomics effective is its restraint. It doesn’t overstate its case or rely on dramatic claims. Instead, it builds its argument carefully, using evidence, examples, and thoughtful analysis to guide the reader.
The pop culture framing makes the book accessible, but it’s the economic analysis that gives it weight. I found the balance between the two well handled, though readers expecting a lighter read may be surprised by the book’s seriousness.
One of the most compelling aspects is how the book reframes everyday decisions as economic ones. Choices about caregiving, flexibility, and ambition are often treated as personal lifestyle preferences, when in reality they’re shaped by policy, norms, and opportunity structures.
Not every section resonated equally with me, but even the weaker chapters contributed to the overall argument. This feels like a book meant to be revisited rather than consumed quickly.
The pop culture framing makes the book accessible, but it’s the economic analysis that gives it weight. I found the balance between the two well handled, though readers expecting a lighter read may be surprised by the book’s seriousness.
One of the most compelling aspects is how the book reframes everyday decisions as economic ones. Choices about caregiving, flexibility, and ambition are often treated as personal lifestyle preferences, when in reality they’re shaped by policy, norms, and opportunity structures.
Not every section resonated equally with me, but even the weaker chapters contributed to the overall argument. This feels like a book meant to be revisited rather than consumed quickly.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
✨ Swiftynomics by Misty L. Heggeness
⭐️ 5/5 stars
Economics + Taylor Swift? YES, PLEASE! 💡
Swiftynomics is an absolute gem for anyone who loves Taylor Swift and wants to understand the economics behind her empire. Misty L. Heggeness combines sharp analysis with an engaging, witty tone that makes complex concepts feel approachable and entertaining. The book dives into how Swift’s business decisions, branding, and cultural impact intersect with economics—and it does so in a way that feels fresh and empowering.
What I loved most is how the author uses real-world examples from Swift’s career to explain broader economic principles. It’s smart, creative, and surprisingly inspiring. Whether you’re a Swiftie or just curious about the business of fame, this book is a must-read.
⭐️ 5/5 stars
Economics + Taylor Swift? YES, PLEASE! 💡
Swiftynomics is an absolute gem for anyone who loves Taylor Swift and wants to understand the economics behind her empire. Misty L. Heggeness combines sharp analysis with an engaging, witty tone that makes complex concepts feel approachable and entertaining. The book dives into how Swift’s business decisions, branding, and cultural impact intersect with economics—and it does so in a way that feels fresh and empowering.
What I loved most is how the author uses real-world examples from Swift’s career to explain broader economic principles. It’s smart, creative, and surprisingly inspiring. Whether you’re a Swiftie or just curious about the business of fame, this book is a must-read.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
This was a great book about women's roles in the economy, as well as the challenges we face. The author discusses working mothers, pay inferiority, and how women are not treated equally as they should be. She used Taylor Swift, as well as other celebrities such as Beyonce and Madonna, as examples of hard working women who had to fight to get to where they are today. This book is perfect for feminists who need a boost to show how strong women are, and that we can do anything we set our minds to, even if we have to work a bit harder to get there. This book gave me hope that we're on the right path to women holding more leadership positions, and the changes we can make in this world.
December 13, 2025
A fascinating deep-dive into women’s participation in the economy, structured around how Taylor Swift (and the Eras tour, her re-records and purchase of her masters, and everything else surrounding her) demonstrates it.
If you’re a fan, you’ll appreciate the references (each section begins with a lyric or quote). If you’re not a fan, don’t worry— this book uses Taylor as a starting point, but covers everything from other musical artists to actual economists.
(I got this ARC through NetGalley)
If you’re a fan, you’ll appreciate the references (each section begins with a lyric or quote). If you’re not a fan, don’t worry— this book uses Taylor as a starting point, but covers everything from other musical artists to actual economists.
(I got this ARC through NetGalley)
January 28, 2026
i did not and will be not applying for a visa to swifty island. but i give credit where it's due <3
February 1, 2026
I have selected this book as Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 2/1, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.
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