Don’t be misled by the title. Swiftynomics is not a book about a pop star. It is a book about women — the work we do, the value we create, and the ways economics has failed to account for any of it.
Drawing on data, history, and lived experience, Misty Heggeness tells a larger story about power, visibility, and what happens when women’s contributions are treated as peripheral rather than foundational.
Heggeness is uniquely qualified to make this case. She is co-director of the Kansas Population Center, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas, and a former principal economist and senior advisor at the U.S. Census Bureau. She understands both the data and the institutional blind spots that shape how that data is collected, interpreted, and valued.
This is not a book that could have been written from the outside. It required someone who stayed in the field long enough — and pushed hard enough — to see where the models break down.
That persistence matters. I wanted to study economics at university, but the economics professors laughed me out of the business building. Their loss. But experiences like that are not incidental to Swiftynomics. They are the story. For generations, women’s economic contributions have been treated as peripheral or ignored altogether. Heggeness’s work makes clear how costly that omission has been.
The book opens by tracing this problem back to the origins of economic theory itself. Early economists built their frameworks while relying on the unpaid labor of women whose work made their productivity possible. Those women were excluded from the models, and that exclusion became precedent. We are still living with its consequences.
From there, Swiftynomics moves through a series of themes — reinvention, survival, misogyny, care work, generations, motherhood, self-investment, negotiation, and long-term planning — using cultural references, data, and history to show how women navigate an economy that was never designed with their lives in mind.
Chapter titles borrow from Taylor Swift’s music, but the device isn’t gimmicky or heavy-handed. It makes a serious message more accessible.
One of the book’s most important contributions is its treatment of care work. Heggeness explains how economics ignores the immense value of the work women do — both paid and unpaid — to sustain households, communities, and the labor force itself. Much of what allows others to be productive exists because someone else is absorbing the work of care. Historically, men have benefited from that arrangement. Women have carried it.
This imbalance becomes especially visible around motherhood. Heggeness documents how women’s earnings and career trajectories often track closely with men’s early on, only to diverge sharply once they have children. The loss of momentum, visibility, and opportunity is not a reflection of diminished ability or ambition. It is a structural penalty built into how work is organized and rewarded.
The book’s use of high-profile figures like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé is particularly effective here. These women illustrate how economic agency changes outcomes. Their ability to bring their children on tour, buy back their catalog, and reinvent themselves over time demonstrates what it looks like to mastermind one’s own economic life — pushing back against systems that would otherwise limit them.
By making that impact visible, they expose the extent to which women already contribute to the economy. They also offer a glimpse of how the workforce might look if it were redesigned to support women.
Importantly, Swiftynomics does not stop at diagnosis. Heggeness lays out practical, intelligent ideas for change, emphasizing self-investment, strategic planning, negotiation, and collective action. She is clear that progress has always been generational: each cohort pushes the boundary a little further, often at personal cost, so the next can go farther still. We are not done yet.
What stays with me is Heggenesse’s summary: “Women make up half of humanity, but our needs, our priorities, in fact, the entirety of our work has been largely ignored and undervalued. Girls do run the world, and it is time we told the rest of the world to start acting like it.”
Swiftynomics is a call to action. First, for women to stop trying to fit into a system not designed for us. But also for spaces where we are not held back, where we have equal opportunity for equity, safety, and advancement both at work and in the home.
Sounds right to me. Let’s do it.
