Principal Economist and Senior Advisor at the US Census Bureau. She is also creator of The Care Board, a dashboard of economic statistics built by and for caregivers that brings their economic contributions into the fold.
Heggeness applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy, with the following results:
Page 99 does a surprisingly good job of setting the stage for Swiftynomics because it situates Taylor Swift within a longer lineage of women who reshaped pop culture—and the economics of the music industry—by refusing to accept the constraints placed on them. This section focuses primarily on Madonna, tracing the ways her career mirrors and anticipates Swift’s success: the intense connection between artist and fans, the persistent underestimation of women’s intelligence and ambition, the policing of their visibility, and the outsized scrutiny of their personal lives.Visit Misty L. Heggeness's website.
The page concludes:Taylor Swift is similar to Madonna. Madonna oversees her music, writing her own lyrics, and tied her own growth and experiences growing up female into the type of artist she would become. She championed for young women’s voices and experiences to be heard in art and advocated for the LGBTQ+ community. Madonna’s Blonde Ambition Tour of the 1990s was in many respects the original Eras Tour. It focused on the various eras or ‘worlds’ of Madonna’s music career. It became not only a concert, but an immersive theatrical experience.Swiftynomics is not intended to be a biography of Taylor Swift, and page 99 captures the book’s core method and ambition. A browser opening to this page would quickly grasp that the book uses pop culture case studies to illuminate much larger economic ideas about labor, power, gender, and value. It shows how women’s creative, cultural, and economic contributions are routinely trivialized—even as they generate extraordinary returns.
By not focusing exclusively on Taylor Swift, the page also makes clear that Swift’s career, while phenomenal, is not an isolated story. It is part of a continuous history of women who have had to break new ground in order to build something new.
Finally, this page reflects how I draw on my dual expertise as a labor economist and a serious pop music fan to do this work—and to invite more women to see themselves as economists or economic agents. By placing Madonna, Taylor Swift, and artists like Beyoncé in conversation with economic theory, Swiftynomics argues that cultural phenomena often dismissed as frivolous are, in fact, powerful data sources for understanding how markets reward—or fail to reward—women’s work. Ultimately, this page makes clear that Swiftynomics is about far more than one superstar. It is about how women, across industries, learn to mastermind their own futures in systems not built for them.
--Marshal Zeringue
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