Category: economics

Taylor Swift and ‘billionaire democracy’

I am a middle-age man with vaguely conservative leanings. I live in Ohio. I grew up on 80s heavy metal. Therefore, I am supposed to hate Taylor Swift…if you believe the mainstream media, that is.

I don’t hate Taylor Swift, though. I don’t even “hate” her music.

But dismay is another matter. I will admit that I am dismayed by the Taylor Swift phenomenon, in both musical as well as sociopolitical terms. Let me explain.

Taylor Swift would not have been a big deal in the 1980s. At all.

I enjoy testosterone-soaked heavy metal as much as any Gen X male, but my musical tastes also include plenty of female artists and bands. That’s always been the case.

In the 1980s, we had many talented and popular female vocalists. And they were diverse, in the best sense of that word: Pat Benatar, Whitney Houston, Patty Smyth, Diana Ross, and Gloria Estefan. (Madonna was good, too, before she went totally nuts.)

We had some talented and popular all-female bands. The Bangles were my personal favorite. But there were also the Go-Go’s and Vixen. The Pretenders had a great front lady, Chrissie Hynde.

Had Taylor Swift debuted in 1986 instead of 2006, she would have been regarded as a competent but unspectacular mid-lister. No way she could have edged out the aforementioned musical acts.

Instead Taylor Swift launched at a time when the music industry was in the throes of consolidation. The Internet and online piracy were decimating album sales.

That changed the economics—and the market offerings—completely. Record companies could no longer afford to invest in scores of singers and groups, many of which would inevitably fall by the wayside.

Instead, they needed a manufactured megastar. That’s what Taylor Swift was—and is. Swift is photogenic and competent. Her music is mediocre, but it’s “good enough” for the adolescent/young adult pop sphere.

Even more importantly, Swift is personally reliable and hardworking. Unlike so many musicians of the 1970s and 1980s, Swift has never been an addict or a flake. (It’s worth noting that Taylor Swift really took off around the same time that Britney Spears imploded, due to various personal issues.) Swift is the perfect corporate-driven musical vehicle for an era of industry consolidation.

That much makes sense to me, even though I know how much bleaker the musical landscape is, with so much attention heaped on the unremarkable Taylor Swift. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of economics.

The Taylor Swift personality cult

What makes much less sense to me is the Taylor Swift personality cult.

Back to the 1980s. There were plenty of teens and young adults who were drawn to the flamboyant personas of popular musicians like Madonna, Michael Jackson, and David Lee Roth.

This involved some superficial imitation. 1980s “Madonna fashion” was very much a thing, among high school girls of my generation. There were teenage boys and young men who wore their hair in the style now known as a “mullet”. (“Mullet”, by the way, is a retroactive term that was unknown in the 1980s). All of the male singers on MTV were wearing their hair that way, so it must have been cool.

But such fashions and styles were just that: fashions and styles. We all had our favorite musical acts. But virtually no young person in the 1980s felt or sought a deep personal attachment to Michael Jackson, Madonna, or David Lee Roth.

And as far as taking political advice from them? Puh-leez. We saw them for what they were: profit-driven entertainers.

Fast-forward to the present and the “Swifties” phenomenon. There are millions of young people today who have developed a parasocial relationship with Taylor Swift. A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship, in which one person is mostly unaware of the other person’s affections, or even their existence. Such is the lot of the rabid Taylor Swift fan.

Although Taylor Swift has had her share of male stalkers, the Swifties are not distinguished by a sexual attraction to Swift. (Most Swifties are girls and young women.) Rather, Swifties are young people who have built a fantasy world around their imaginary relationship with Taylor Swift.

Oh, sure, Swift might occasionally like one of their social media posts, or pose with them for a selfie outside a concert venue. For the most part, though, Swift doesn’t know they’re alive, at the individual level.

In my social circle here in Ohio, I know at least one young woman who is a diehard Swiftie. I’ll call her Emily.

Emily was born in the early 1990s and is now in her thirties. Emily prominently refers to Taylor Swift on all of her social media profiles. Emily’s prized possession is a photo taken with the Goddess Herself, outside a Taylor Swift concert she attended.

Emily is attractive, but she has no husband, no children. She has a sort-of boyfriend. I’m not sure if she has a cat. (A nod here to J.D. Vance’s contentious remarks about childless Americans, and Taylor Swift’s recent self-description as a “cat lady”.)

Billionaire-driven “democracy”

The Swiftie phenomenon is a marketing juggernaut, of course. Taylor Swift gives her fans the experience of an imaginary friendship, and they give her large portions of their disposable income. Tickets for Swift’s last concert tour rose into the four-figure range.

Taylor Swift recently became a billionaire. Thanks to millions of Swifties like the aforementioned Emily.

The takeaway here is that Taylor Swift has become much more than a manufactured megastar. For millions of young Millennials and Zoomers, she’s become a substitute for healthier, real-life relationships.

And since Swifties have so much invested in Taylor Swift, they’re willing to do just about anything the singer requests—or is perceived to request.

Taylor Swift has just endorsed Kamala Harris for President of the United States. This, in itself, is her right to do.

Nor am I perturbed by the fact that Swift’s politics are Democratic Party boilerplate. The Democratic Party, once the party of factory workers and farmers, is now the party of entertainment and business elites. Swift’s endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket surprised no one.

What is more troubling is that the singer, thanks to the vacuum in so many of her young fans’ lives, is able to exert the influence of a cult leader. Swift’s ability to command her followers has been documented in past elections, namely the 2018 midterms and the 2020 general election.

The mainstream media has not scrutinized this. On the contrary, there is a substantial overlap between the personality traits of a Taylor Swift cult follower and a mainstream media journalist. Journalists and university academics have lined up to fawn on the billionaire entertainer.

A recent article in UC Berkeley News began with the line, “Leaders at the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans say Swift and other young icons might inspire millions to feel hope—and power.”

The whole thing seems, on the contrary, rather top-down to me. Let’s see:

  1. Millions of young people send Taylor Swift their money, making her a billionaire at the age of 34.
  2. Taylor Swift tells millions of young people how to vote.
  3. Millions of young people do as the singer commands.

How is that “democracy”?

Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris-Walz will no doubt bring about denunciations in the conservative media space. I can also see conservatives floating a boycott of Swift’s music and concerts. This will be an embarrassing failure. The fans of Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh were never Taylor Swift fans, anyway.

They would do better to focus on getting Donald Trump elected instead. Taylor Swift might be a mediocre singer whose talents nevertheless shine in the Internet-vaporized music industry space. She might have found herself the (probably) accidental leader of a personality cult.

And yes, Swift is the ultimate limousine liberal, the supreme Hollywood hypocrite. Swift is uninterested in energy policy and fuel prices, because she travels around on a private jet. Swift’s enormous wealth shields her from the negative effects of inflation.

Whatever the Founding Fathers had in mind when they put American democracy together, I’m pretty sure the Taylor Swift version—billionaire democracy—wasn’t it.

But Taylor Swift is not evil. She isn’t even the source of what ails us. Taylor Swift, rather, is a symptom: of a society that has been systematically dumbed down for three generations now.

Don’t blame Swift. Blame the gullibility that has given her such unwarranted economic and political clout.

-ET

The job market: what goes up must come down

In case you haven’t heard, the booming job market of the post-pandemic era has officially come to an end. Earlier this week, the US Labor Department reported that job openings are the lowest they’ve been since January 2021, when much of the country was still under COVID lockdown rules. The unemployment rate now stands at 4.3%.

The experts are starting to worry, maybe even panic a little. This goes for the public sector as well as the private sector.

“The labor market is no longer cooling down to its pre-pandemic temperature, it’s dropped past it,” one private-sector hiring expert told CNBC. “Nobody, and certainly not policymakers at the Federal Reserve, should want the labor market to get any cooler at this point.”

There also seems to be a sense of panic among new college grads. The mainstream media is full of articles about the difficult time young people are having, navigating the abruptly tighter job market.

I can understand a sense of disappointment. Anyone who will graduate next spring (2025) effectively missed the boom, after all. The best time to graduate with a newly minted college degree was in 2022 or 2023, when corporate employers were scrambling for people, and paying signing bonuses.

It’s important to remember, though, that unemployment rates of the last two years, which have been well under 4%, are not the historical norm. In the university economics courses I took in the late 1980s (which are admittedly dated in 2024), we were taught that an unemployment rate of 5 percent is the acceptable baseline.

I was a new college graduate in 1991. The unemployment rate was then near 7%. Was it difficult to find a job? Sure, a little. But I managed to find one. So did most of my friends. And I’m not only talking about people with the most in-demand majors. My degree was in economics. I knew people who found jobs with communications and English degrees.

Based on the numbers, the job market is not “bad”. (As a new college grad in 1991, I would have regarded a 4.3% unemployment rate as a vast improvement in my situation.) Rather, the job market has simply returned to something approaching “normal”. It was unrealistic to believe that the job market was going to remain in its 2022-2023 state, with job seekers holding all the cards.

But if you were a job seeker during that time, it was sure nice while it lasted.

-ET

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Are you the CEO of your own life?

If you have done any reading in the business/self-help genre, you have no doubt come across the following sentence:

“You are the CEO of your own life.”

On the surface, this sounds empowering. There is, moreover, a large measure of truth to it. If you are an unincarcerated adult living somewhere in the free (or semi-free) world, you are, indeed, the CEO of your own life.

***

But there’s a problem here.

Imagine, if you will, a CEO sitting alone at the head of a large table in a boardroom. The boardroom is located on the sixth floor of the company’s headquarters.

The headquarters building is empty, Except for the CEO.

How much could such a CEO get done?

Who would do the hiring? Who would plan production? Who would ensure that the company’s products were of the highest possible quality?

By himself, a CEO doesn’t get much done at all.

Let’s bring this back to the personal metaphor. Yes, by all means, you are the CEO of your own life. But you are also the sales manager, the quality control chief, the head of purchasing. You’re responsible for personnel matters, and for economic forecasting.

You’re much more than the CEO of your own life. Being the CEO of your own life is just the starting point, really.

-ET

Confessions of a childless cat lady

I have been doing my best to ignore the J.D. Vance “cat lady” nonsense. It would seem to me that with two wars, a border crisis, and economic uncertainty, we all have bigger fish to fry.

Nevertheless, some of the related memes have made their way into my personal Facebook feed. There is a certain kind of person who seems to think that the opinion of Jennifer Aniston or Taylor Swift automatically lends weight to a particular viewpoint. I beg to differ.

I would ordinarily remain on the sidelines during a debate like this. But perhaps I have a dog in this fight. I am, alas, a childless cat lady of sorts myself. I’m 56 with no children, and—at this point—the odds of me procreating are minimal.

I’m not going to apologize for not having kids. At the same time, though, I must acknowledge: people getting married and having kids is what makes the world go around.

That has nothing to do with religion or so-called “family values”. It is, rather, economics, at the most basic level. The economies of both Japan and South Korea are hitting the wall right now because they have lost the will to reproduce themselves. Many European countries face the same predicament.

Likewise, I don’t fundamentally have a problem with the idea that as a childless person, I have a different perspective from someone who has children and (at my age) even grandchildren. This is no different from someone pointing out that as a straight white male, I don’t have the same perspective as someone who is black, gay, female, or LGBTQ.

So what’s the big deal? I understand, of course, that this is an election year, and political partisanship is involved. But beneath that, there is an apparent desire on the part of some voters to constantly have their self-esteem stroked, to constantly be told that their choices were the best ones that could possibly have been made.

Like I said—no apologies for the choices I’ve made. But if J.D. Vance (or anyone else) fails to high-five me for being a genetic dead end at 56, I’ll understand. They can high-five me for something else.

Now…back to those two wars, the border crisis, and economic uncertainty.

-ET

The Bengals’ defeat, and those curious expressions of fan loyalty

As some of you may know, the Cincinnati Bengals lost the AFC championship game to the Kansas City Chiefs last night.

This morning, my personal Facebook feed, heavy with Cincinnati residents, was filled with professions of fan loyalty, like the one above: “Still my Bengals.”

Others were professing their “fan loyalty” in more abstract terms. Some declared that they would stick with the Bengals no matter what.

And here is one of the places where I can’t connect with the rabid spectator sports fan: this concept of team loyalty.

If you find spectator sports enthralling, that’s one thing. The fact that I don’t find them particularly entertaining is a mere matter of preference.

Similarly, we all enjoy different television shows and movies, different kinds of music. I don’t happen to be a fan of country music. This doesn’t leave me shaking my head at the preferences of country music fans.

But then, most country music fans aren’t making public declarations of fan loyalty when their favorite artist fails to win a CMA award. Only spectator sports fans do things like that.

A professional sports team—the Cincinnati Bengals, the Kansas City Chiefs, whatever—is a corporation that sells an entertainment product. No different from Sony Pictures or Netflix. Fans of entertainment companies are more accurately called consumers.

If you enjoy an entertainment company’s product, so be it. But it’s important to remember where you stand, in the big scheme of things, before getting too invested in this fan loyalty concept.

Take Joe Burrow, the Cincinnati Bengals’ 26-year-old quarterback. Joe Burrow has a 4-year contract worth over $36 million. And—of course—a beautiful girlfriend with a widely subscribed Instagram account. Rich young celebrity athletes with beautiful girlfriends are nothing new, of course.

More power to Joe Burrow. I’m sure he’s talented and that he’s worked hard. But it’s somewhat self-deluding—if not foolish—to think that this man needs your expressions of loyalty after he loses a game.

And he certainly isn’t reading your Facebook feed.

But of course, these public expressions of fan loyalty aren’t really about the team. Otherwise, they would be sent to the team, instead of directed toward one’s friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. (Consider the sports team flags on your neighbor’s pickup truck. Who are those intended for?)

These expressions of fan loyalty seem to be more about the need for group affiliation, than any genuine devotion to unknowing, millionaire celebrity athletes. And this need (among some people, at least) goes all the way back to the Byzantine Empire. In Byzantine times, different factions of chariot racing fans actually evolved into the equivalent of paramilitary organizations. All based around spectator sports.

While I can somewhat understand this impulse—especially in light of its historical roots—I just don’t get it, at a visceral level. Why? What’s the point?

But hey, that’s just me.

If you’re an ardent Bengals fan, my condolences on last nights defeat. But Joe Burrow, I’m quite sure, will be just fine without my sympathy, let alone my expressions of fan loyalty.

-ET