Very Well Written. As a huge Taylor swift fan, I immediately wanted to read this, and it gave me a different perspective of her. I was not expecting this type of book but upon reading it, I found out i wasnt aware of what she was actually doing to the world around us. Such a great book!

I will take any opportunity to talk about the pure magic and genius that is Taylor Swift, but having a literal report of the economic impact that she has created just shows what a powerhouse she really is.

I was lucky enough to attend The Eras Tour in 2024, and I saw firsthand the effects of the tour on New Orleans, LA - it was legitimately a different city that week! Small businesses were thriving, the streets were clean, the city was safe, and it was one of my favorite experiences.

Overall, this book is so well written and thought out, and I really enjoyed reading it!

Note: I understand that it's far too late for this comment, but "Swiftie" is always spelled with an ie, and not a y.

Thank you to the author and University of California Press for my advance digital copy!

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!

I differ from other readers whose reviews I have seen in that I am not a fan of Taylor Swift and am not taken in by the power of her celebrity or in awe of her in that way. Yet, I found this book to be an incisive and interesting look at the socioeconomic and political history of women in work. In this book Heggeness uses Taylor Swift as a lens through which we can analyse and better understand how the role of women in the American workforce has transformed over time and how economic independence is just as fundamental a right to actively bolster and support in the fight for women's rights as reproductive rights, right to political participation, and the right to education are. I especially appreciate that the author doesn't shy away from discussing race, sexuality, invisible labour, caregiving and the current attack on initiatives such as diversity and equity. As a result of the choice to include these topics, Heggeness provides a rich and nuanced view of how we define and understand the role of women in the economy and challenges the way that we are taught to seek and interpret data about the circumstances of societies at large by walking the reader through the ways that certain kinds of data are prioritised whilst other more inconvenient data is either ignored or not even recorded.

Swiftynomics was a smart, empowering, and surprisingly fun read that made economics feel fresh and deeply relevant. The author blended pop culture, feminism, and data with wit and insight, showing how women, both megastars like Taylor Swift and everyday people, drive the economy in powerful ways. I loved how engaging and accessible it was while still delivering sharp analysis and real takeaways. It made me see both pop culture and economics through a new lens.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author and the University of California Press for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

An enchanting read about the money side of Taylor Swift. It was interesting to read about the economic impact by her, especially with the Eras Tour and how she boosted the economic of cities.

“Swiftynomics” is a look at the macro and microeconomics impact of women in the world. This book is primarily concerned with women and labor, consumer choices by women, and the broader cultural impact of women as active participants in modern day capitalism. With this in mind, I found the title and framing of this book both confusing and a little strange.

The content of this book seems to have some interesting things to say about the intersections of gender and economics. However, I found that it was obscured by the often times awkward shoehorning of Taylor Swift into each chapter and paragraph. I found it very distracting to have subheadings that were all titles of Taylor Swift songs when the arguments of those sections often had nothing to do with the song’s subject matter. I found myself getting bogged down in wondering why the author chose to title each section and what the connections might be to Swift’s hyper intentional lyrical choices.

Each chapter does try to explicitly tie in some aspect of Swift’s life or career with the themes it’s exploring, but the connections were flimsy at best.

I was really looking forward to this book, as I’m both a swiftie and a behavioral economics nerd. If this book had been presented as quite simply a look at gender and economics in the 21st century and had ONE chapter that focused on Taylor Swift, that would have landed much better than what it is currently doing.

I also want to note that the title of this book is especially misleading and confusing — since the Eras Tour, the Swift effect is a known phenomenon used to describe the economic impact of Taylor Swift on countries and cities her tour visited. My thought initially was that this was going to be a book that focused solely on the economic impact of Taylor Swift or the economic power of swifties. While this book speaks to that briefly, the scope is much larger.

The research and writing in this book are clearly done with care and rigor. And I don’t object to the quality of the writing! I wish this book had been marketed differently and had tried less to shoehorn Swift into every single idea.

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)

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.

Part history. Part educational. Part love letter to Taylor Swift. I thoroughly enjoyed this well researched book that explained Taylor Swift’s impact not just as a musician and icon, but as a businesswoman. Thank you Misty Heggeness (go KU) and NetGalley for the opportunity to read Swiftynomics.

✨ 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.✨ 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.

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.

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

“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.

A bright, feminist, pop‑economics read that’s far more fun than a book about labour markets has any right to be.

I loved this deep-dive into the phenomena that is Taylor Swift on her world tour. When I first read the BBC article about Taylor Swift's concerts contributing a significant amount to local economies via hotels, restaurants, and other activities, I was struck by the power of women's financial interests to move markets. I was so proud and awestruck because many patriarchal societies ensure that women do not reach their full financial power, but this movement really showed everyone, especially men, that even though they don't get paid as much, their interests and voices have more power than men would expect.

One aspect I particularly enjoyed about this book was the chapter titles touching on various Taylor Swift songs, or eras, because it shows not only the evolution of her music, but also how female fans grew up with her while experiencing their first financial milestones, such as getting an allowance to graduating to a part-time job, and so on. It was an echo of the growing financial power women will experience as they move from their pre-teens into their adult years, so hitting the last chapters felt like a crescendo. However, there is no telling when this phenomena will happen again, leaving the conclusion an open-ended curiosity of speculation.

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.

Swiftynomics was a great insight into how Taylor Swift built her empire and the economic impacts that her status of an artist has brought to the country and world. I think being able to read about Swift and other women in the industry was a real eye opener and lent a different perspective for someone like me who loves Swift as an artist but wasn't as aware of just the extent of her overall reach and the impact to the economy. I think this is a testament to how impactful one person can be and how the strength behind the woman can make the difference.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, University of California Press, for an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.