How Fed Chair Ben Bernanke ’75 Discovered Economics at Harvard

As a still-undecided sophomore, Ben S. Bernanke ’75 did what hundreds of Harvard students have done for decades: enroll in Economics 10, the school’s introductory economics course sequence.

“I didn’t know whether I wanted to do science or humanities or what. I went from thinking about physics and math to going to history to English, and I really couldn’t find a home,” Bernanke said.

The Winthrop House resident, who had arrived a year earlier from the small town of Dillon, South Carolina, would leave the course intent on pursuing economics — and took the first steps down the path that would one day culminate with him at the helm of the Federal Reserve.

“I decided at the end of my sophomore year, having taken only Ec 10, that I would major in Economics,” Bernanke said. “My junior year, I just took nothing but Economics.”

Over the next two years, the future Fed chair would diligently pursue his economics studies, writing an award-winning senior thesis and eventually graduating Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. After obtaining his Ph.D. from MIT four years later, he taught at Stanford and then at Princeton, spending more than 20 years as an academic.

In 2005, Bernanke pivoted to government work, first with a seven-month stint as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors before becoming chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006 — just two years before the United States plunged into the Great Recession. For his role in steering the Fed’s response, he was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2009, before winning the Nobel Prize in 2022 for his research on financial crises.

But according to Bernanke, his success in his field — and at Harvard — was far from obvious. He said the transition to Cambridge was difficult, both culturally and academically, and went home after his first semester unsure if he could “hack it” at Harvard.

But classmates from Ec 10 said that by sophomore year, Bernanke was already leagues ahead.

Suzanne P. Bishopric ’75, who took Ec 10 with Bernanke, recalled that he somehow “seemed to know things that were in the next chapter of the textbooks” and would probe their professors about past policy decisions.

“He would ask questions that made you think a little bit differently,” Bishopric said. “What other paths might have been taken?”

“He would always come up with another angle, ‘What if they had done this, or why, or whatever’ — because he knew what the options were,” she added.

Daniel I. Small ’75, a fellow Winthrop House resident, described Bernanke as “curious about everything” — not just about quantitative economics or academic theory, but its practical implications.

“There are a lot of folks who are brilliant in those kinds of fields, but not good at integrating that into the real world,” Small said. “And that’s not Ben. Ben was infinitely curious about how that technical world integrated with the real world.”

Bernanke even saw everyday interactions through an economics lens, according to his Ec 10 classmate Mark S. Campisano ’75.

Campisano recalled walking along Holyoke Street to a lecture with Bernanke. At one point, Campisano stooped to pick up a nickel — only to be scorned by Bernanke.

“Ben said, ‘Huh — I never stop to pick up anything less than a dime.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. He replied, “Because my marginal cost would exceed my marginal utility,’” Campisano wrote in an emailed statement.

Campisano recalled laughing, and then dishing right back.

“‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Your utility curve is obviously shaped very differently from mine,’” Campisano wrote.

But despite his deep intellectual passion for economics, Bernanke was “never a recluse,” according to his friend Ira J. Finch ’75. Finch said Bernanke often played saxophone in the Winthrop junior common room, accompanying Finch, a pianist.

According to Small, Bernanke could also have been found working at the Winthrop Grille, playing cards to the tune of ’70s rock and roll, or grabbing roast beef sandwiches from Elsie’s, a popular joint on Mount Auburn Street.

Still, Bernanke acknowledged that he remained focused on his academics.

“I was pretty focused on work, and I wanted to make up for what I felt were the deficiencies of my high school education,” Bernanke said. “So I spent a lot of time on that.”

In his junior and senior years, Bernanke narrowed his focus, working primarily under the guidance of the prominent economist Dale W. Jorgenson.

Jorgenson, who taught econometrics to Bernanke during his junior year, took Bernanke under his wing, hiring him as a summer research assistant and bringing him along when Jorgenson testified before Congress on natural gas price controls.

“I still think it’s incredible, because I didn’t know anything,” Bernanke said. “He was just a great mentor, very kind to me, even though he was a big shot and I was just a junior.”

Jorgenson, though, thought Bernanke was an exceptional talent, telling the New York Times in 2008 that his former student “was the superstar of all time as an undergraduate.” Under Jorgenson, Bernanke wrote his senior thesis, focusing on the deregulation of natural gas — an uncommon position at the time, until the United States liberalized the natural gas market in 1978.

That was the role Bernanke expected to play, he said: an academic who spent his time researching public policy, not necessarily creating it.

“I was doing monetary policy because I thought it was important from a public policy point of view,” Bernanke said. “I had no intention or no expectation that I would ever be doing it myself.”

But when he received a phone call “out of the blue” in 2002 to interview for a position on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Bernanke said he couldn’t turn the opportunity down.

“I kind of figured that if I’m going to be studying this topic and I have the opportunity to put it into practice, I really ought to do it,” he said.

Small, Bernanke’s friend from Winthrop House, agreed that Bernanke was “most comfortable in the academic world” — and in a sweater and khakis rather than a suit.

But Small said Bernanke’s characteristics predisposed him to success as Fed chair, even if Bernanke himself never expected to do the job.

“Looking back now, it’s not surprising that someone with that level of brilliance, curiosity, and humility would achieve that,” Small said. “To have brilliance, curiosity, and humility — I’ve met people with one of those qualities, but Ben has all three.”

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.