U. Delaware’s New Economics Workshop Covers Taylor Swift
“Bender said she hopes the workshop will get more women interested in economics at the University of Delaware.”
The University of Delaware has an economics workshop about Taylor Swift, which doesn’t count for any credits: “Data Enchanted: Transforming Numbers Into Knowledge.”
Swift’s dad went to U. Delaware. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Taught by longtime Swiftie and assistant economics professor Kathryn Bender, the not-for-credit workshop uses Swift’s Spotify streaming data and a sizable amount of Easter eggs to teach the basics of data visualization. Those who complete the workshop will receive a data analytics certificate, said Bender.
Bender’s course is one of several popping up at colleges and universities across the United States that examine Swift through a scholarly lens. You can compare her songwriting to the works of revered poets at Harvard or use her lyrics to understand youth psychology at Arizona State University, but “Data Enchanted” is among the first to study Swift quantitatively.
The angle makes sense: Swift became a billionaire as her international “Eras Tour” has boosted local economies still recovering from the pandemic. It’s the first tour to gross over $1 billion, and Swift has continued to break box office and streaming records.
Bender said she hopes the workshop will get more women interested in economics at the University of Delaware, where only 25% of economics majors identify as women, under the national average of 33% for large research universities.
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I would love to see someone have Swift on for an interview and ask her to sum up everything she knows about economics using as much time as she would like.
I’d rather see this done to AOC. There’s not a lot of fun to be had in watching someone quickly run out of things to say. But watching a degreed professional spout hours worth of flagrant misinformation could be hilarious.
Where are the grownups who are supposed to nip this kind of childishness in the bud?
Who is the “chair” of economics at U Delaware?
Where is the president of the “university”?
And how can this place get its accreditation renewed?
Senator Coons—Is it possible for you to do anything useful for the people of Delaware?
I can’t identify a single one of her songs. I do know that she wears a lot of lipstick and every picture has her mouth open wide. Hmmmm, maybe I have her confused with AOC.
The only thing I connect with Taylor Swift is somebody’s observation that Joe Biden should be less than thrilled to have been endorsed by a singer whose every song is about the bad choices she makes in men.
If that is what it takes to get people interested in economics and data then good for the Prof in trying a new angle.
How Swift became a billionaire and how she with her team manage their online presence along with her finances would be interesting I think.