an extremely good teacher from the first
He had planned to study math, then flirted
Tarpswith physics and English before settling on economics. “Ben Bernanke, I learned more from sitting behind you in Ec 10 than from the class,” a classmate, Suzanne Powell Bishopric, wrote in a report for a Class of 1975 reunion that takes place next month. (Mr. Bernanke isn’t attending.)
Dale W. Jorgenson taught Mr. Bernanke econometrics at Harvard and supervised his senior thesis, which used economic models to examine natural-gas pricing — a timely topic in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.
Mr. Bernanke lived in Winthrop House, a dorm along the Charles River, where classmates included Lloyd C. Blankfein, now C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs (who didn’t know Mr. Bernanke well).
At Mr. Jorgenson’s direction, Mr. Bernanke entered the Ph.D. program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fellow graduate students there included Paul Krugman and Kenneth S. Rogoff, who would become two of the best-known economists of their generation. (Mr. Krugman also writes a column for The New York Times.)
Alexander S. Kelso Jr., who shared an M.I.T. office with Mr. Bernanke, says his classmate “may have been the smartest one of us, but he had plenty of competition.”
In 1978, Mr. Bernanke married Anna Friedmann, whom he had met on a blind date. A Wellesley alumna, she had been born in Rome, the daughter of Jewish refugees from Croatia, and grew up in Denver.
Mr. Bernanke’s 1979 dissertation explained why firms delay decisions to invest in times of uncertainty. He turned down Harvard for a job at Stanford’s business school. (His wife, a Spanish teacher, received a master’s in Spanish from Stanford and recently founded a school for disadvantaged teenagers.)
“He was an extremely good teacher from the first,” says Jeremy I. Bulow, a friend from M.I.T. who joined Stanford’s business school at the same time and still teaches there. “
TarpsHe’s probably had to make an effort to learn how to be less clear to do his current job.”
