Yesterday, on my Substack Newsletter, I ran my first gimmick promotion for the Brisbane to Gold Coast Ride against Cancer [1]. I invited anyone who donated $100 to nominate a topic on which I should write a post. Reader Daniela Brins-Norris has taken me up on the offer, and asked for a piece about the economic significance of Taylor Swift. Although this is a bit outside my usual set of topics, readers who know me well won’t be surprised to know that I have spent some time thinking about this and have strong (but weakly held) opinions.

I’ve been thinking about two questions. First, how did Swift become the cultural and economic phenomenon she is now? Second, what does her status as a self-made billionaire say about income distribution and public policy? I’ll write about the first today. If anyone would like to donate another $100, I’ll do the second.

For the first question, I’ll offer some amateur cultural analysis along with a bit of economics. As background, although Swift has had a long and successful career (beginning in 2006 at age 16) there was, until recently, nothing to predict the phenomenon we see now. As of 2015, she could have been seen as first among equals in a group of white female pop singer-songwriters that included Adele, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor. That’s not a genre I follow closely (the female singer-songwriter I really admire is the marvellous Judy Small who is about as dissimilar as possible), but the song from that group I liked best was All About That Bass by Trainor, which seemed to prefigure huge success, rather than her subsequent sequence of modest hits.

Swift’s transformation began in 2021 when she re-recorded her back catalogue, outmanoeuvring the record companies who owned the masters of the originals. This turbocharged her career, setting the stage for the 2023 Eras tour, which turned her from a pop megastar (big, but not exceptional) into a cultural and economic phenomenon, whose tours were sought after by prime ministers and presidents. By this point the relevant comparisons weren’t with her contemporaries but with cultural figures like Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles and Michael Jackson.

As the re-recording episode shows, Swift is an exceptionally good businesswoman. Her success here contrasts sharply with that of the stereotypical 1960s rocker, forced out on the road again because their accountant has looted the bank account.

There’s still a puzzle remaining to be resolved. Taylor Swift has a lovely voice and is a talented songwriter, but, unlike the people I’ve named, she’s not a radical innovator. That’s not true of Swift alone. From the beginnings of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, through heavy metal and psychedelia to rap in the 1970s, radical innovation was the norm. Since the 1980s, new styles have mostly been hybrids and recombinations (acid house , dubstep and so on) or attempts at returning to rock purity (grunge and, before that, punk).

Drawing a long bow, I’d link to this to the decline of the teenager as a central category in music and culture generally. Before the 1950s, the word “teenager” was almost unknown. Young people turned from children at 13 into legal adults at 21, with the “awkward age” of adolescence in between. The advent of mass secondary schooling, followed by the impact of the Baby Boomers produced a large group whose tastes, for the first time, dominated popular music. And since the teen years are short, the demand for something new was ever present.

There’s not much of this left today. Teenagers are once again the subject of adult and parental concern rather than the central actors in cultural drama. The audience for popular music is no longer segmented by age in the way it used to be. This in turn makes it possible for someone like Taylor Swift to build up both an audience and a repertoire over decades rather than years.

That audience maps on to her own career remarkably well. The core group of Swifties is dominated by women aged between 16 (her age when she began her career) and 36 (her age today). Her songs chronicle her own journey through those years, and resonate with her fans. That broad spread makes it possible for her to pack stadiums around the world, even at the eye-watering ticket prices that prevail today,

As I mentioned at the beginning, this success has made Swift a billionaire. As someone who holds the view that “every billionaire is a policy failure”, that raises some questions for me. If you want my answer now, donate here. Otherwise you will have to wait.

Again, you can support me here

How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation

I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the mysterious “city burners” responsible for the massive destruction of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE.

Following this up, I learned that the periodization I was taught in school had been totally abandoned over the second half of the 20th century. In that story, the Bronze Age was succeeded by the technologically superior Iron Age. Progress continued until Roman decadence led to barbarian invasion and the Dark Ages, now more neutrally described as the Early Middle Ages.

Instead, the end of the Bronze Age was followed by a centuries-long Dark Age, with regression much more complete than after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Greek civilisation, centred on the Mycenaean palace culture, collapsed almost completely, to the extent that writing was completely lost. Homer’s account of the Bronze Age was written centuries after the event, and with nothing but oral tradition to go on.

Obvious candidates for the cause were the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III claimed to have defeated around 1187 BCE. This claim was discovered in the 19th century, hadn’t been much discussed outside Egyptology (a point made by Emily Wilson in her highly critical review). In the film, Odysseus admits to his wife that “we are the Sea People” and foreshadows the Bronze Age collapse.

More recent scholarship sees the city burners, whoever they were, as secondary causes of a collapse induced by, and reinforcing, the breakdown of the complex economic structures required by the need for copper and tin to produce bronze. Bronze weapons and armour were the central requirement of the aristocratic warrior class represented by the Acheans at Troy. Climate change, always a suspect in civilisational collapse, also appears as a possible cause.

The eventual emergence of iron as a cheap (though initially inferior) replacement ended the era of the heroic warrior. Iron weaponry produced something analogous to the modern mass army, in which the entire male citizen class was expected to serve (Socrates, for example, was an Athenian hoplite, noted for bravery).

All of this is directly opposite to the pop culture of the American manosphere. Rome wasn’t brought down by the decadence of Nero and Caligula but by the shift of power to what is now Istanbul centuries later. The Hegsethian heroes described by Homer either destroyed their own society (a reading perfectly consistent with the endings of the Iliad and Odyssey) or were brought down by their failure to manage the economy and the environment.

Add in an absurd misreading of Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, and you have the MAGA theory of history.

fn1. I have now, but I wrote this first and saw no need to change it

My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length here and at Crooked Timber, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that Silver treats the question as new, I thought it might be useful to restate the basic points from this discussion.

• Always and everywhere, controlling for education and other variables, higher income is correlated with rightwing voting
• Nearly always and everywhere, controlling for income and other variables, more education is correlated with leftwing voting<
• Because income and education are positively correlated, these two tend to cancel out
• With the (now only historical) exception of parts of the US, rural voters in developed countries are reliably rightwing
• Because of the history of slavery, civil war and segregation, US, Southern Whites in the US vote like an ethnic bloc, defined in opposition to Blacks. This fact largely accounts for the greater success of Trumpism compared to European far-right parties
• The most important form of identity politics is default identity politics, based on the idea that members of the unmarked category (in the US, white Christian men) are the natural representatives of the country and should therefore run it
• All of these are tendencies rather than uniform rules. There have always been “working class Tories”, “millionaire liberals” and so on

A nearly final observation following from this. As a conceptual tool for analysing voting patterns, the term “working class” is too ambiguous to be useful. It can mean anything from “wage workers in labouring and manual trade occupations” (perhaps 20 per cent of the population) to “below median income” (50 per cent by definition) to “did not complete 4 years of college” (about 60 per cent) to “income not primarily derived from capital ownership” (95 per cent), with only partial overlap between these categories. All of these definitions are useful in some contexts, but in debates over voting patterns they form a hopeless jumble.

And finally a restatement, While I’ve linked all of this to my own posts, I’m not claiming originality for these ideas. Just making the point that Silver is claiming as a discovery something that anyone paying attention could have observed at least a decade ago.

As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out

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