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rinceton Magazine caught up with the fast-moving Chairman of the Federal Reserve when he was in Princeton to deliver the Baccalaureate address to the graduating class of 2013. He took time out of his busy schedule to reflect on his early years, his route to Harvard, his time at Princeton, life in Washington, and the lessons of the Great Depression for the nation’s central banking system. So if you are reading this in hope of finding tips on how to beat the market or for news of what the Fed Chairman has up his sleeves, you won’t find it here. Born in Augusta, Georgia on December 13, 1953, Ben Shalom Bernanke grew up in the small town of Dillon in South Carolina where his pharmacist father Philip and his Uncle Mort ran the drugstore owned by his grandfather, an immigrant to the United States by way of Ellis Island in 1921. His mother Edna was an elementary school teacher and then a homemaker with three children, Ben and his younger siblings, Seth, now a lawyer living in Charlotte, and Sharon, an administrator at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Young Ben worked summers in the store, cleaning or stocking shelves, often distracted by the comic bookshelf. Always a voracious reader, his favorite books were Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and baseball stories. He still has ties to the South. His mother lives in a
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retirement home in Charlotte, where both his parents moved after the drugstore was sold. His father died last summer. Uncle Mort still lives in Dillon. The local high school is so proud of its former class valedictorian that it held Ben Bernanke Day in his honor. Bernanke returned
and during his summers as a student gave Bernanke an appreciation “for how hard people have to work in order to feed their families.” In 2009, the South Carolina Department of Transportation designated Exit 190 along Interstate Highway 95, in Dillon County, Ben Bernanke Interchange.
are sometimes accused of physics envy in the sense “Economists that it is simply not the case that economics can be modeled with the precision of physical phenomena, human beings are much too complicated...
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recently to celebrate and to touch base with former classmates and teachers, including Helen Culp, who ran the band program and taught him to play the saxophone. He made the All State Band in 9th grade, but mostly it was a social thing, he says. “We gave concerts several times a year, which in Dillon was a pretty big cultural event, and marched at football games and in parades.” His first visit to Washington, D.C. was to march in the Cherry Blossom Parade. “Small towns have a lot of civility, you know everybody and everybody knows you so there are strong social mores,” says Bernanke. “Small town culture is supportive in many ways, you feel part of the place, part of the school, and it had a big influence.” As it is today, Dillon in the 1960s was economically distressed. Working construction and waiting tables before going off to college
HARVARD AND ECONOMICS 101 As Bernanke recalls, he had no expectation of leaving South Carolina. Another Dillon resident forged a path that he would follow to Harvard. “The Mannings, who were very prominent in Dillon’s black community, were friends of our family. They shopped in the drugstore and one of their sons, Kenneth, was an extraordinary individual. He still is. He went to Dillon public schools until high school and then under some scholarship program went to a private school in Connecticut and from there to Harvard. In fact, he went on to Harvard graduate school and became a professor of history of science and now teaches at M.I.T. I didn’t see him that much, because he was not around and because segregation was still part of life in South Carolina, but he took an interest in me and he was persuaded that I ought to come up to Harvard and be part of that broader intellectual community. He made several efforts to persuade me to apply, which I eventually did. My parents were not at all happy about it. My mother was very concerned that I wouldn’t be able to fit in socially,” he recalls. One day, young Ben came home from school to a phone call. A voice said: this is Harvard Admissions and we’d like to offer you admission to the freshman class. Bernanke’s response was skeptical. He said; “Who is this, really?” At Harvard, the future macroeconomist was interested in everything, first math and physics, then English and history. When it came time to choose a major, he was at a loss until a class by Martin Feldstein introduced him to economics. He was captivated by its combination of quantitative and qualitative—statistical, empirical datadriven work with aspects of history and social science. He graduated with a B.A. in economics, summa cum laude, in 1975 and then went on to earn a Ph.D. from the