What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Economics

M.H.: And also because I think in the field of
economics, we’ve focused so heavily in modern economics on efficiency, and we
really have done a disservice in terms of helping the larger society understand
issues of initial endowments. And you know, if you’re born into a family in
poverty, it’s not going to be as easy for you to pick yourself up by your
bootstraps as it might be if you were born into a wealthy family. I think that
women get this so much more than men because we’ve been ignored for so long
within our economic statistics and economic foundations, so much of our labor
isn’t accounted for.

M.P.: Speaking of that, Vice President JD Vance has
talked about how he wants to see more babies in America. And at the same time,
the Trump policies all make it harder for women to have careers and for people to have economic stability. What do you as an economist make of
these kinds of contradictions?

MH: The JD Vances of the world, and the Trumps of the
world, they really struggle with something that I call care privilege. Care
privilege is: You are an able-bodied adult, but yet you have your care needs
being met by other people. So somebody’s washing and ironing your clothes,
somebody’s cooking your meals, somebody’s taking care of your children. And there’s
a lot of folks with big amounts of care privilege on the Hill, as well. I think
that they really struggle to understand the realities of the people who provide
care in this society and in this world. When you are somebody who has lots of
care privilege, and you don’t have to think about the hit you might have to
take to your income for having children, or the hit you might have to take to
your sleep, or your ability to have some leisure time … when you have lots of
care privilege, you don’t think about those things and you don’t understand
them. And so when you speak about things that are related to caregiving, like
raising the next generation and having children, oftentimes what you’re saying
misses the boat, because it’s very off-kilter from the realities of people who
are actually providing care in society.