The Economics of brat

365 econ girl / bloggin' that

The brat remix album “Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat” by Charli XCX came out last Friday, and the Kesha remix of spring breakers came out on Monday, so I thought it was as good an occasion as any (at least post-Nobel Prize and post-me-having-surgery-and-not-being-able-to-write) to move into a new field: the economics of partying and being hot and cool.

Many people reading might not have listened to the original album (it’s very good) or might think they don’t know Charli XCX (but you almost certainly do). Either way, the term blew up in popularity among “olds” (here’s Jake Tapper and, for example, Matt Yglesias) ever since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for President. In partciular, a torrent of memes (some posted by me) of her in various lime green contexts, usually with audio of her “coconut tree” soundbite.

Given that it’s been a brat-tastic year all around, then: why not make it reach the economics blogosphere too? What does the Charli XCX album in question have to say about major questions in economics?

Should we do a little key and have a little lime?

What even is the album about? It’s about a combination of commentary on women’s role in the music industry, and a paean to the virtues of partying basically, as well as a meditation on other aspects of Charli’s life and career. I’m going to spare you the gender angle for the most part, so go read Alice Evans’s blog and insert whatever you read here. But mass media does indicate the temperature of overall social norms and politics, so I think that’s an important angle to keep in mind.

Let’s focus on the economics of partying. Is being a party animal an economically rational decision? In a way, yes, actually. Firstly, being more socially active in general is a good idea: for teenagers, having one more friend resulted in an increase to earnings or 7% to 14%, and having friends with academically supportive family backgrounds increases grades (for all races and income groups). Additionally, having a broader social group increases your chances of finding a job and increases your wages for similar positions, especially if it’s a close friend - because referrals are a big plus. For example, immigrants who have established social groups among the existing immigrant community have better labor market outcomes than “pioneers” who arrived without a community. And socioeconomic mobility is higher when people have friends across different groups, potentially because of the labor market referral channel, plus effects on unemployment and income. In another (perverse) dynamic, being a member of exclusive clubs has significant income benefits over the long run. Overall, being popular in your social clique is associated with significantly higher earnings, and having a broad social circle in general improves labor and education outcomes for young people.

As a general rule, soft skills are extremely important for labor market performance, and they have been growing in relevance lately. But what does this have to do with partying? Well, there’s some evidence showing that drinkers earn more than non-drinkers, which is a famous paradox (so famous that the first time I heard of it was a paper debunking it) - partly it’s because alcohol is a normal good and thus higher earners drink more, but I also think there’s an actual thing here. This is because of the “schmoozing gap”: smokers also make more money than non-smokers when the boss is a smoker (but not vice versa), because smoker employees and smoker bosses tend to socialize during, well, smoke breaks.

But of course, not everything is positive about a life of fun and parties. There is ample evidence that, for young people, being around others who drink alcohol (and alcohol shows some patterns that are similar that for drugs, so findings may be extrapolated) increases your chances of drinking alcohol, even a lot, and that this is not offset even if it’s purely transitory. For high school students, being a heavy drinker increases your chances of dropping out of school, and for college students, it’s correlated with worse academic performance - plus heavy drinkers in general do worse in the labor force, with worse conditions, and worse pay and benefits. Lastly, alcohol consumption is associated with higher likelihood of being a victim of a crime, particularly violent crime, and especially sexual assault (both by strangers and people known to the victim). Generally, heavy consumers of alcohol tend to engage in more risky sexual behavior, but there’s no clear causal evidence beyond lower use of contraceptives, and higher rates of sexually transmitted disease. And finally, alcohol abuse is highly correlated with domestic violence for partners who cohabitate, which is clearly visible after major sporting events (particularly football).

I’m your favorite reference baby

The song 360 is mostly about how important it is it is to be hot, fashionable, and influential. A few other tracks on the album, like 365 and Von Dutch make a similar case. But does being “an it girl” actually matter?

Well, yes! Studies find that people actually place a big emphasis on being “cool” for their peers, which is defined differently for different peer groups. Offering students SAT (a pre-college exam) preparation materials, kids choose the materials at high rates when the decision is private (because it’s a good idea), but if the decision is public, students in high-achieving classes take the package more often if they’re low-achieving, and in low-achieving schools, students don’t take the package even if they’re high-achieving. And students in high-achieving classes are likelier to publicize wanting to sign up for the same SAT prep than students in regular classes, at least if the decision to sign up is public. The big fish in small ponds want to make themselves smaller, and the small fish want to be bigger, basically.

Of course, that’s stupid and un-brat. As readers of previous posts might be familiar with, there is a clear correlation between having a unique fashion sense and technological innovation. Using a database of yearbooks and the style elements of high schoolers, you can find that how individual a person’s clothing, hair, and makeup style has gone up in time, and that schools located in districts with more novelty in attire have substantially higher rates of patenting and innovating in technology.

So if you are everywhere and so Julia, it’s extremely likely that you live in a forward-thinking milieu. Being cool pays off. But does being hot pay off? Well, yes! For starters, attractive children are educated longer than unattractive children, which results in higher earnings down the line, even after controlling for things like social outcomes and self-confidence. Similarly, attractive people outearn unattractive people by such a degree that the gap is larger than the racial income gap, and among Black people, it’s larger than the gender wage gap. Being attractive results in higher performance ratings for professors (especially for women), higher chances of getting into a top PhD program for economists, better performance for financial analysts, higher earnings and better professional outcomes for lawyers, and even better electoral and partisan outcomes for politicians. Importantly, while billionaires are more attractive than the average person in their demographics, their attractiveness isn’t correlated to their wealth, which points to the wealth not being the cause of the attraction. And it’s true that attractive hedge fund managers tend to perform worse than “uggos”, this is because they have it so much easier, since “objectively attractive” people have an easier time being hired, so they can get hired on a thinner resume.

So if being hot is so important, does having an “enhanced face” beat “natural lips”? No! Firstly, there’s a high correlation between parental attractiveness and the attractiveness of children, and siblings tend to be similarly attractive to each other and to their parents (which is also all correlated with higher earnings). However, even if investing in beauty seems like a good idea, it doesn’t actually pay off: for women, being better dressed and wearing nicer makeup only pays off by around 10% of the spending, and plastic surgery isn’t actually a good strategy to raise your personal earnings for most people.

Never get invited ‘cause I’m such a hater

One part of the album that many people may be familiar with are the songs about her relationships with other musicians - particularly feeling jealous of their success (like in Sympathy Is a Knife), resentful of their complicated personal relationship, or just feeling inspired by them.

Well, there’s a solid economic basis to this idea of resentment. A paper (summarized here in Spanish) looking at people’s preferences for income redistribution finds that they have a strong desire to make those slightly more successful worse off. Basically, running an experiment where people they are given their own income level and two income distributions, and they are asked which one they prefer (without changing their own) - that is, they’re asked whether they want to improve the lives of the poor, benefit their own stratum, or are biased against (or in favor of) the wealthy. Broadly, people tend to choose to increase the earnings of the lowest septile, but also decrease the earnings of the highest septile - showing both concern with the poor and disdain for the rich. But, disaggregating per septile, people in every income level want to improve the situation of the poorest group, worsen the situation of the richest group, and worsen the situation of the group immediately above their own - so perhaps sympathy really is a knife, at least when it comes to taxation and redistribution.

Likewise, zero-sum thinking for individuals is associated with more government support for redistribution across both income and race, but with opposition to immigration (summary here and links to further research). Using a survey that samples of US residents, economists find that people with a mindset where one can only succeed at the cost of another (i.e., a zero sum mindset) are both more left wing economically but more right wing socially. This is linked with their personal and familiar experiences - particularly, experiences with immigration, slavery, low socioeconomic mobility, and/or discrimination. Put another way, people who are more successful are less zero-sum, and people who face higher hardships are more “us-or-them” - which means that someone “famous but not quite” like Charli would be likelier to have strained relationships with successful peers.

Of course, not every professional relationship is negative. In particular, the album highlights a very productive and inspiring relationship with the late producer SOPHIE, who died in an accident six years ago. People are inspired and learn from each other frequently - for example, students during the British Industrial Revolution in the 1680s were highly influenced by the research of their professors (Twitter thread here). Analyzing the research titles with AI yields that a 5% increase in professor interest in certain topics could increase student interest by as much as 13%. Contrarily, women inventors were locked out of associations and networks in the Industrial Revolution, resulting in less productive and commercial work on their behalf. Likewise, getting to know immigrants is a good way to reduce prejudice against them, and women sent down to work to Chinese areas with more progressive values had higher labor force participation. Lastly, men exposed to talented women learn to appreciate their contributions - such as with federal workers during the First World War.

But this interest in being respected and acknowledged isn’t just based on respect and admiration from your peers and fans - it’s also about getting awards, like the song spring breakers implies. Looking at the cooking show Cuthroat Kitchen, where the cooking contests are occasionally interrupted by an auction where a player is sabotaged, economists find that players tend to pay for the prestige of being the winner of the show by around 10,000 dollars. Similarly, mathematicians who win the Fields Medal (the “Nobel” for math) have similar career trajectories to other prestigious mathematicians before winning, but tend to change their tack after winning: they write fewer papers and explore unfamiliar and complicated topics. Finally, in economics, including a Nobel laureate in the list of authors for an identical paper raises the acceptance rate for papers from 35% to 80% in top journals, which means that it’s an objectively good career move to win a top prize in your field. So, after all, wanting to blow up the Grammys may be a reasonable reaction to a decade of snubs.

The things passed down from all the apples coming before

A slice of the album that isn’t actually talked about as much as the “be cool, be hot, get laid” part or the “beefing with FKA Twigs” part is the segment about Charli’s personal struggles - particularly involving her family and her desire to get married and settle down.

Firstly, the song “rewind” expresses a desire to go back in time to a simpler, easier time. While this is not an uncommon feeling, the truth is that it’s not an acucrate one. Looking at perceptions of changes in social and personal attitudes, studies find that people are extremely bad at estimating how attitudes have changed - particularly, wrongly estimating the share of people who hold various stances in 96% of cases. Participants particularly overestimated how socially progressive society had gotten, regardless of their own personal beliefs on the matter. Similarly, when looking at new technologies across different times, people tend to rate older technologies more favorably: when a newer technology was informed to be older to study participants, they shifted their attitude towards a more favorable one.

However, not everything is perfect about the past. In the song Apple (the one with the dance!), Mrs XCX mentions having a complicated relationship with her parents, expressing a very Kamala Harris-esque sentiment:

I think the apple's rotten right to the core

From all the things passed down

From all the apples coming before

This, of course, reminds one of the concept of socioeconomic mobility, and the things that get passed down from parents to children in particular. Parents are, of course, extremely influential on their children - economically, but also across other dimensions. Traditionally, research on socioeconomic mobility has focused on the impacts of fathers on children (and also grandparents), but adding in the mother makes for some pretty interesting conclusions - the human capital of mothers is important when they take up the majority of childcare and education, whereas with schooling it becomes less predictive (because of greater mobility). Of course, the economic possibilities of women have improved substantially across time, with changes to the economy and education making it possible to aspire to success - for example, the success of being a pop star who sings about cocaine. This is especially important because values around the role of women get passed down across generation - areas with a more “frontier” rugged mindset are much more conservative than similar areas without that history.

In particular, this affects decisions around the labor market, parenting, and marriage - topics that Mrs XCX sings about at length in the album. Disapproval of women with jobs drives their marriage opportunities and decisions, with a post-marriage earning penalty being observable in some countries. This is part of the gender wage gap, which is largely a product of childcare demands and thus can be said to have three general components: a motherhood penalty (self explanatory), the impacts of differential treatment based on gender (which is usually priced in and influences outcomes), and a fatherhood premium, since men make more after birth than women. Of course, marriage and parenting are generally happy experiences to most, which is why people do it even if it’s extremely costly - much like Charli in “i think about it all the time”, women tend to want to have children - so infertility is really bad for mental health. Wanted pregnancies are, of course, very different from unplanned ones, which tend to be extremely disruptive.

Nevertheless, parenting is extremely important, particularly because you can set an example for your kids - and for other people’s kids. Women whose classmates had working moms placed a significantly higher value on employment, so they experienced smaller drops in labor force participation after having their own kids. Peer groups in the neighborhood have extremely large impact on educational and school outcomes, and kids more connected in socioeconomically diverse groups had higher economic mobility. But much more importantly, women can be role models for each other: mothers and the mothers of “gal pals” are determinant for gender identity formation (i.e. ideas about gender), and can greatly influence future employment prospects. This is common across studies: girls with more “gender conformist” attitudes had lower income later in life, mainly due to lower employment rates. However, women who exhibited less gender conforming behaviors in childhood also had lower earnings in some cases, mostly because they were penalized for infringing gender norms later in life (this is not universal across industries, though).

So complicated norms about gender are largely holding women back, as I said in a previous post. So what is to be done? Well, it helps to have other women who “ride for you”, to paraphrase Lorde in the girl, so confusing remix. In STEM PhDs, women are 12% less likely to graduate than similarly qualified men to drop out if there are no women in their cohorts; an increase of women of one standard deviation reduces this probability by 5 points, mostly in the first year, and more strongly in more male dominated programs. Women have also been observed to perform better when other women are present with them, and worse when men are present. And lastly, exposure to women breaking social norms can be beneficial for others: women sent down to work to Chinese areas with more progressive values had higher labor force participation, and men exposed to talented women learn to appreciate their contributions - such as with federal workers during the First World War. However, as I’ve previously noted, representation doesn’t always make a difference - women in corporate boards via quotas are not actually effective at hiring more women, and women are largely less influential than their male counterparts.

Conclusion

While the impact of brat on the U.S. presidential election is yet to be seen, its impact on economic views is clear: partying is good (to a degree), being cool and sexy is good (but not worth a lot of money if you’re not), and knowing other people and forming bonds with them is fun and cool.