I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton’s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away.

Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination Library, which sends free books to children every month from birth to age five. There are currently 3 million children enrolled, and the program has given away over 300 million books.

That didn’t leave Parton poor. Her estate was estimated at $400 million, mostly tied up in property rights of the kind discussed below — copyrights and her theme park, Dollywood. She lived well, in a substantial house on 60-odd acres of land just outside Nashville. But lots of people have substantial houses and, at least for an Australian, 60 acres doesn’t sound like much. More notable was her ostentatious, but deliberately cheap, self-presentation — rhinestones rather than diamonds.

Now for a repeat of the Taylor Swift analysis.

The claim “Every billionaire is a policy failure” is pretty widely accepted these days, formulated most clearly in Ingrid’s case for limitarianism (a hard cap on the maximum wealth anyone can have). Looking at the Forbes list of the richest people in the world (one woman in the top 20), it’s hard to disagree. Most are thoroughly objectionable, and even those who aren’t personally appalling mostly made their money from monopoly (for example, Warren Buffett) or inheritance (members of the Walton family).

But what about the good billionaires, a category for which Taylor Swift (ranked about 2000 in the list) seems like the ideal example? Before her, there was J. K. Rowling, but look how that turned out. Swift seems to tick all the boxes. Apparently a nice person (if you ignore the promotional feuds with other celebrities), generous with her money, treats her employees well, politically progressive without being obnoxious about it, and a philanthropist, though nothing like Dolly Parton.

And she’s made her money honestly, selling records and concert tickets to people who want to buy them. Revealed preference arguments need to be treated with care (Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Walmart is the classic here), but Swifties have plenty of alternatives on offer. At the margin, a dollar spent on Swift is a dollar less for other entertainers, but that’s not a consideration we usually regard as relevant in our current system.

So, if there’s a problem with Swift’s wealth, it’s not a problem with her, but with the system that makes such massive wealth possible. For Swift, that comes about in several ways.

First, the money she makes from selling records and merchandise depends on the system of “intellectual property” (in this case, mostly copyrights and trademarks). Unlike many entertainers, she’s been highly successful in capturing this for herself rather than letting record companies grab it.

Second, her returns from ticket sales to her concerts depend on the availability of stadiums. These are sometimes explicitly subsidised by the public and always dependent on land-use regulation.

Finally, the returns she gets when she invests her wealth are higher than those available to ordinary households. This is at the core of the r > g point made by Piketty a while back.

These compounding effects would be greatly reduced by a more progressive income tax system (a top marginal rate of 70 per cent) and by wealth taxes, capturing the excess returns to high wealth. In combination, these would make it very difficult to become a billionaire by entertaining people. Other measures would be needed to deal with the massive accumulations of corporate wealth represented by the multibillionaires.

Given her dependence on the society that made her wealth possible, Swift can have no legitimate moral objection to a tax system that shares it out more evenly. But is there an economic cost here? The standard story is one about incentives and effort. But it’s hard to believe that Swift would write fewer songs, or perform fewer concerts, if the return were in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions. And, as I already observed, most of the ultra-rich have made their money in actively harmful ways. Even where there is an actually useful product involved, the super-profits have come mostly from monopoly or speculation.

In summary, in a society which produces billionaires, there’s no reason to object to Taylor Swift becoming one. But we could have all the music we need or want in a society without billionaires. Indeed, with policies like a participation income or livable income guarantee, we could see a lot more people making music, some of which might turn out better than what the industry currently gives us.

* In support of my fundraising for the Brisbane to Gold Coast ride against cancer, which was hugely successful. Thanks, everyone!

A couple of years ago, I edited a volume on pluralizing political philosophy, in particular in relation to economic and ecological inequalities. It was put together under the Covid-pandemic, so we had to swap the authors-conference for online meetings, with the authors spread out from China to Argentina. Sometimes the people in the most unfavorable timezones joined us literally in the middle of the night. I have always been very grateful to the contributors for running the extra mile under those circumstances, and some of the contributors gave the book what I am suspecting have been their darlings – papers on which they either had been working for a long time, or else papers that contained really original ideas. The book also includes a separate part with discussions of the main papers.

Against that background, I felt a little sad that (to the extent that I have been able to find out) the book hasn’t been picked up much. The first and so far only book review (in the Erasmus Journal of Economics and Philosophy) came out last week. But now one of the contributors, Krushil Watene, wrote to say that she has been teaching a course on the book, which is wonderful. If her students read this, they are very welcome to let us know their comments and impressions of the various chapters, including whether they think the book works for teaching (my assumption has been that it should be really useful for teaching, since it basically has all these different perspectives and arguments on why to pluralize political philosophy and how to do so, also if one is still on square one. But, as always, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.) And the book can still be downloaded for free.

At the end of a glorious day hanging out at galleries, antique shops and the pub with friend and historian Matt Allen we walked to the station at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia (where I live) for Matt to get the train back to the city. We were confronted with this glorious mural representing a bushranger named Govett, leaping off the cliff with gun in hand and bags of gold strapped to his horse. How gleeful is he? Ecstatic with ‘you’ll never catch me alive’ liberation – short-lived though (what with gravity and the considerable depth of the valley) his life or liberty from here on must surely be. Also RIP horsey.

Image: mural of Govett’s Leap at Blackheath railway station.

That is not a period weapon, said Matt, ever expert on colonial Australia. And I dunno, I answered. If I were carrying bags of gold I don’t reckon I’d label them with GOLD in big black letters.

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Ceuta, the small Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa, has been in the news lately.  And I’ve seen a couple of articles mentioning that Ceuta has been a Spanish possession since 1668.

Which triggered my inner history nerd, because on one hand actually Ceuta has been under the Spanish crown since 1560, not 1668.  And also, Ceuta has been under European control for even longer, because the Portuguese conquered it way back in 1415.  That’s knights-and-castles time, most of a century before Columbus.

[a long day of street-fighting with swords and axes]

So why 1668?  Because in 1560, Spain took over Portugal and all Portuguese possessions.  Then eventually the Portuguese rebelled against Spanish rule.  Which led to a protracted war of independence that wasn’t resolved until 1668 when, as part of the final treaty / divorce settlement, Spain got Ceuta.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, archeologists have found about a dozen glass beads of European origin.  They’re either Venetian glass beads, or French copies.  What makes these particular beads interesting is that, depending on which group of experts you believe, they are from sites that date either to the late 15th century, or the late 16th century.  Either way, these beads were in Alaska long, long before any European.

[around 500 years, give or take]

These two facts — the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta and the Alaskan glass beads — are related.  What connects them is, of course, deflation.

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A summer anecdote: when on holidays in France, on a sunny August day, we visited a castle garden in rural Normandy. When buying the tickets, we got the usual: “Your postcode or country of origin?” We said “Germany,” and suddenly the face of the young woman at the counter lit up. “Would you mind doing us a favor?,” she asked, while fishing a piece of paper from a big pile – it turned out to be a German version of the leaflet about the garden. “We’ve recently made those, but they need to be checked. Would you mind having a look?” “Sure,” we said, and asked for a pen to insert whatever corrections might be needed.

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Yesterday, 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.

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The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, likes to invoke international law. Imagine that one day, someone had finally responded to him. Not just anyone, but one of the founding fathers of international law.

It happened just after the Ceuta incident, in July 2026, when tens of thousands people from Morocco surged into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in Northern Africa. The incident caused diplomatic tensions with both Moroccan and European leaders. It was precisely the kind of case that Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546) used to solve.

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… is set out over the fold. I’m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it’s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far.

• Fourth repost since 2011

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.

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Progressives scored a win over establishment Democrats in the Michigan primary election for Senator on Tuesday’s election. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens by 1 point, despite many polls predicting that he would win by 7 or more. And Stevens beat him soundly in Wayne (Detroit), Oakland, and Macomb counties, where the most Democratic votes will be in the general election. Without getting blacks in Detroit on board, he is toast. And a defeat in the general for the candidate who campaigned on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending aid to Israel would also support the argument of the establishment wing of the party, that progressive issues are too far left to win in Michigan, which features an almost exact 50-50 split between the Democrats and the GOP.

Yet on any issue other than Israel that would actually come up for a Senate vote, El-Sayed and Stevens would not vote much differently. Although El-Sayed throws off DSA vibes, he is not a member and calls himself a capitalist. I suspect that many of El-Sayed’s votes came from the considerable segment of Democrats who are upset with their party because it lacks “fight,” and are treating candidates who take what are seen as very progressive stances in an aggressive tone of voice as a proxy for being tough fighters. But that conflation is a serious mistake. It confuses a certain style of performative politics with having a real grasp of how to change things so that public policies that help ordinary people can be enacted.

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According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don’t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read at all in the space where science fiction and fantasy meet literature, you’ll almost certainly have read someone who knew his books, and very likely loved them. Susanna Clarke said in her long ago Crooked Timber seminar that she too had read Little, Big, and I think that it shows. Her most recent book, Piranesi, draws on Borges’ Library of Babel, but I suspect that it was influenced too by the memory palaces that Crowley built on foundations laid by Dame Frances Yates.Ursula Le Guin described Little, Big as “a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” As James Hynes described Little, Big in the Boston Review.

it is a long, gorgeously written, picaresque family saga, in the last fifty pages of which all the major characters, with one heartbreaking exception, turn into fairies. I’ve read Little, Big four times now, and wept shamelessly each time over those last, extraordinary fifty pages, and over the years have purchased and given away fifteen copies of it (when I could find it–it is inconsistently in print). When “You’ll love this” isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.

Me too, on the tears, the giveaways, and the importance. Every time I see a copy anywhere, I buy it, later to press upon some unsuspecting person who seems a likely prospect. I could keep going. Kim Stanley Robinson admires Crowley’s non-f/sf book about Roosevelt’s dream of industrial America, Four Freedoms. Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch owes nearly as much to Crowley as it does to Narnia, and at one point practically quotes the thesis of Crowley’s extraordinary long story, “Great Work of Time.”

I don’t mourn Crowley because of his influence on others, but because of how his writing shaped me. I mention his work often in my own writing, but have never talked about it in its own right. What Crowley wrote is too deeply and intimately entwined with my sense of my own self to to be able to view it from the outside.

When I think about Little, Big, I remember being twenty-one, walking up the hill from work to my family’s house in a small town in Tipperary in Ireland. I had bounced off the book the first time I read it, but for some reason felt pulled back to try again, and read and re-read it, falling in love with it as I have never fallen in love with a book before or since. Walking up the road on a temperate summer afternoon, thinking about the book and how it folded back into the world and itself, felt like a quiet explosion of joy in my chest.

When I think about Aegypt, it is a memory from a year earlier, taking a long train ride from New York to Toronto to visit friends, and rounding a bend to see what was obviously the original for Butterman’s castle. Decades later, when I read “This Is Our Town,” collected in the small Totalitopia volume, it seemed to me a version of my own childhood, transplanted to a small American town; an ordinary Catholic boyhood, whose suffusions of the supernatural painstakingly captured with the apparatus of the fantasy genre.

I got to know Crowley very slightly via email, as he wrote his final book, Flint and Mirror, which was set in Ireland before and during Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion. It was a bitter war. My and Maria’s ancestor Turloch Breasalach was a contender against Hugh for the O’Neillship. Our family tree records that out of twelve sons that Turloch Breasalach had alive at the beginning of the Elizabethan wars, only three were surviving at the end of it. Crowley wanted to use the book to talk about colonialism. The brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world. John Dee, who appeared in Flint and Mirror as well as several other Crowley novels, was not just a wizard but an imperial propagandist.

There’s a single word in Flint and Mirror that I helped shape; a tiny return for the way in which Crowley’s work shaped me. The wave that sinks a ship in the last part of the book is the third wave, because in Donegal folklore, the third wave was the fairy wave. I passed that on to Crowley from a story that my and Maria’s grandaunt Maire MacNeill translated from Irish, “The Knife Against the Wave.” Since Crowley loved fairytales as well as writing them, here is that one. I will miss his writing very much.

The Knife Against the Wave

Long ago a fine able handsome man named Séimín Rua was living at Baile Mór. He and his crew went out fishing with lines to Cúl Fastó an Chladaigh Bháin, a fishing ground in Donegal Bay.

The day changed and the sea rose and it seemed they would be wrecked. Séimín was in the stern of the boat and saw a monstrous wave coming at them. He pulled off one of his shoes and threw it out against the danger. Before long he saw a second wave coming at them: he pulled off his other shoe and threw it out and the sea calmed a little but this was only a short respite. It was not long until the third wave of the sea rose at them and each one of the seven thought that this one surely would drown them. There was a big bait-knife stuck in behind the stern-seat. Séimín caught hold of it and threw it against the danger. No sooner had he done so than the sea fell and became as smooth as a board.

They came home then drenched to the skin and when they reached the shore their families were there waiting for them for they thought by the way the day had changed and the sea had risen they would never see them again. No wonder there was great rejoicing for them. When they had divided whatever fish they had caught and moored the boat they all went home.

Well and good. When darkness fell Séimín was sitting beside the fire, his soles to the warmth, all the neighbours in and he telling them about the hard day they had had. With that, there was a bang on the door. Someone went to open it and who was standing on the threshold but a rider on a white horse! The rider asked if Séimín was within and was told he was. The rider called from the door:

“Séimín,” he said, “I would be very thankful if you would come with me to such a place to pull out the knife you cast into my sister’s heart today!”

Séimín recognized immediately what kind he was. “I will not go out the door on such a journey unless you promise me that neither you nor any of your kind will ever harm me or anyone belonging to me.” “I promise you that,” said the rider, “and I promise you as well that you will be left back home safe and sound before daybreak tomorrow.”

Séimín went with the rider and he neither heard nor saw anything until the white horse came to shore on the Red Strand at Mullaghmore in Connacht. The horse continued on to a crag at the top of the strand where a door opened into the hill and the horse entered. Before long they reached the finest castle Séimín had ever seen. The rider tethered the horse and led Séimín inside. They went upstairs and he was taken into a room where a girl was lying. The bait-knife he had thrown against the dangerous wave was stuck in under her heart and she was screaming with pain.

“Come here,” she said, “and pull this knife out of my heart!”

“I will do that willingly,” said Séimín, “if you promise me you will never harm me or anyone belonging to me.”

“I promise you that,” she said.

Séimín drew out the knife and she was healed. “Why did you try to drown us today?” asked Séimín. “Because I am in love with you and would like to have you for myself.”

“And you were going to drown the whole crew because of me!” “I was,” she said. “I would do anything in the world to get you for myself.”

“Well, you won’t get me,” said Séimín. “I must be on my way home.”

The rider of the white horse was standing at the door waiting for Séimín who mounted behind him, and the horse never stopped until he was left at the door of his own house. The rider bade him farewell and Séimín saw him no more from that day until the day of his death.