Ben Bernanke Commencement Speech - Business Insider
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Clusterstock
REUTERS/Jessica RinaldBen Bernanke speaks at MIT's 2006
commencement ceremony.
BERNANKE TO GRADUATES: 'Success And Satisfaction Will Not
Come From Mastering A Fixed Body Of Knowledge'
Sam Ro | May 18, 2013, 11:39 AM | 3,144 | 6
Ben Bernanke gave a commencement speech to the graduates of Bard College at
Simon's Rock.
"My emphasis today will be on prospects for the long run,"
he said. "In particular, I will be looking beyond the very real
challenges of economic recovery that we face today--
challenges that I have every confidence we will overcome--
to speak, for a change, about economic growth as
measured in decades, not months or quarters."
Bernanke discusses the technological advancements while
focusing on the importance ofcreativity and critical thinking.
"The history of technological innovation and economic
development teaches us that change is the only constant," he said.
"During your working lives, you will have to reinvent yourselves many times. Success and satisfaction
will not come from mastering a fixed body of knowledge but from constant adaptation and creativity in a
rapidly changing world. Engaging with and applying new technologies will be a crucial part of that
adaptation."
Here's the full transcript:
Economic Prospects for the Long Run
Let me start by congratulating the graduates and their parents. The word "graduate" comes from the
Latin word for "step." Graduation from college is only one step on a journey, but it is an important oneand well worth celebrating.
I think everyone here appreciates what a special privilege each of you has enjoyed in attending a
unique institution like Simon's Rock. It is, to my knowledge, the only "early college" in the United
States; many of you came here after the 10th or 11th grade in search of a different educational
experience. And with only about 400 students on campus, I am sure each of you has felt yourself to
be part of a close-knit community. Most important, though, you have completed a curriculum that
emphasizes creativity and independent critical thinking, habits of mind that I am sure will stay with
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you.
What's so important about creativity and critical thinking? There are many answers. I am an
economist, so I will answer by talking first about our economic future--or your economic future, I
should say, because each of you will have many years, I hope, to contribute to and benefit from an
increasingly sophisticated, complex, and globalized economy. My emphasis today will be on
prospects for the long run. In particular, I will be looking beyond the very real challenges of economic
recovery that we face today--challenges that I have every confidence we will overcome--to speak, for
a change, about economic growth as measured in decades, not months or quarters.
Many factors affect the development of the economy, notably among them a nation's economic and
political institutions, but over long periods probably the most important factor is the pace of scientific
and technological progress. Between the days of the Roman Empire and when the Industrial
Revolution took hold in Europe, the standard of living of the average person throughout most of the
world changed little from generation to generation. For centuries, many, if not most, people produced
much of what they and their families consumed and never traveled far from where they were born. By
the mid-1700s, however, growing scientific and technical knowledge was beginning to find commercia
uses. Since then, according to standard accounts, the world has experienced at least three major
waves of technological innovation and its application. The first wave drove the growth of the early
industrial era, which lasted from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. This period saw the invention of
steam engines, cotton-spinning machines, and railroads. These innovations, by introducing
mechanization, specialization, and mass production, fundamentally changed how and where goods
were produced and, in the process, greatly increased the productivity of workers and reduced the
cost of basic consumer goods. The second extended wave of invention coincided with the modern
industrial era, which lasted from the mid-1800s well into the years after World War II. This era
featured multiple innovations that radically changed everyday life, such as indoor plumbing, the
harnessing of electricity for use in homes and factories, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics,
powered flight, telephones, radio, television, and many more. The third era, whose roots go back at
least to the 1940s but which began to enter the popular consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, is
defined by the information technology (IT) revolution, as well as fields like biotechnology that
improvements in computing helped make possible. Of course, the IT revolution is still going on and
shaping our world today.
Now here's a question--in fact, a key question, I imagine, from your perspective. What does the future
hold for the working lives of today's graduates? The economic implications of the first two waves of
innovation, from the steam engine to the Boeing 747, were enormous. These waves vastly expanded
the range of available products and the efficiency with which they could be produced. Indeed,
according to the best available data, output per person in the United States increased by
approximately 30 times between 1700 and 1970 or so, growth that has resulted in multiple
transformations of our economy and society. History suggests that economic prospects during the
coming decades depend on whether the most recent revolution, the IT revolution, has economic
effects of similar scale and scope as the previous two. But will it?
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I must report that not everyone thinks so. Indeed, some knowledgeable observers have recently
made the case that the IT revolution, as important as it surely is, likely will not generate the
transformative economic effects that flowed from the earlier technological revolutions. As a result,
these observers argue, economic growth and change in coming decades likely will be noticeably
slower than the pace to which Americans have become accustomed. Such an outcome would have
important social and political--as well as economic--consequences for our country and the world.
This provocative assessment of our economic future has attracted plenty of attention among
economists and others as well. Does it make sense? Here's one way to think more concretely about
the argument that the pessimists are making: Fifty years ago, in 1963, I was a nine-year-old growing
up in a middle-class home in a small town in South Carolina. As a way of getting a handle on the
recent pace of economic change, it's interesting to ask how my family's everyday life back then
differed from that of a typical family today. Well, if I think about it, I could quickly come up with the
Internet, cellphones, and microwave ovens as important conveniences that most of your families
have today that my family lacked 50 years ago. Health care has improved some since I was young;
indeed, life expectancy at birth in the United States has risen from 70 years in 1963 to 78 years
today, although some of this improvement is probably due to better nutrition and generally higher
levels of income rather than advances in medicine alone. Nevertheless, though my memory may be
selective, it doesn't seem to me that the differences in daily life between then and now are all that
large. Heating, air conditioning, cooking, and sanitation in my childhood were not all that different from
today. We had a dishwasher, a washing machine, and a dryer. My family owned a comfortable car
with air conditioning and a radio, and the experience of commercial flight was much like today but
without the long security lines. For entertainment, we did not have the Internet or video games, as I
mentioned, but we had plenty of books, radio, musical recordings, and a color TV (although, I must
acknowledge, the colors were garish and there were many fewer channels to choose from).
The comparison of the world of 1963 with that of today suggests quite substantial but perhaps not
transformative economic change since then. But now let's run this thought experiment back another
50 years, to 1913 (the year the Federal Reserve was created by the Congress, by the way), and
compare how my grandparents and your great-grandparents lived with how my family lived in 1963.
Life in 1913 was simply much harder for most Americans than it would be later in the century. Many
people worked long hours at dangerous, dirty, and exhausting jobs--up to 60 hours per week in
manufacturing, for example, and even more in agriculture. Housework involved a great deal ofdrudgery; refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves, and washing machines were not
in general use, which should not be terribly surprising since most urban households, and virtually all
rural households, were not yet wired for electricity. In the entertainment sphere, Americans did not yet
have access to commercial radio broadcasts and movies would be silent for another decade and a
half. Some people had telephones, but no long-distance service was available. In transportation, in
1913 Henry Ford was just beginning the mass production of the Model T automobile, railroads were
powered by steam, and regular commercial air travel was quite a few years away. Importantly, life
expectancy at birth in 1913 was only 53 years, reflecting not only the state of medical science at the
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time--infection-fighting antibiotics and vaccines for many deadly diseases would not be developed for
several more decades--but also deficiencies in sanitation and nutrition. This was quite a different
world than the one in which I grew up in 1963 or in which we live today.
The purpose of these comparisons is to make concrete the argument made by some economists, that
the economic and technological transformation of the past 50 years, while significant, does not match
the changes of the 50 years--or, for that matter, the 100 years--before that. Extrapolating to the
future, the conclusion some have drawn is that the sustainable pace of economic growth and change
and the associated improvement in living standards will likely slow further, as our most recent
technological revolution, in computers and IT, will not transform our lives as dramatically as previous
revolutions have.
Well, that's sort of depressing. Is it true, then, as baseball player Yogi Berra said, that the future ain't
what it used to be? Nobody really knows; as Berra also astutely observed, it's tough to make
predictions, especially about the future. But there are some good arguments on the other side of this
debate.
First, innovation, almost by definition, involves ideas that no one has yet had, which means that
forecasts of future technological change can be, and often are, wildly wrong. A safe prediction, I think
is that human innovation and creativity will continue; it is part of our very nature. Another prediction,
just as safe, is that people will nevertheless continue to forecast the end of innovation. The famous
British economist John Maynard Keynes observed as much in the midst of the Great Depression
more than 80 years ago. He wrote then, "We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic
pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which
characterised the 19th century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going
to slow down." Sound familiar? By the way, Keynes argued at that time that such a view was
shortsighted and, in characterizing what he called "the economic possibilities for our grandchildren,"
he predicted that income per person, adjusted for inflation, could rise as much as four to eight times
by 2030. His guess looks pretty good; income per person in the United States today is roughly six
times what it was in 1930.
Second, not only are scientific and technical innovation themselves inherently hard to predict, so are
the long-run practical consequences of innovation for our economy and our daily lives. Indeed, some
would say that we are still in the early days of the IT revolution; after all, computing speeds andmemory have increased many times over in the 30-plus years since the first personal computers
came on the market, and fields like biotechnology are also advancing rapidly. Moreover, even as the
basic technologies improve, the commercial applications of these technologies have arguably thus far
only scratched the surface. Consider, for example, the potential for IT and biotechnology to improve
health care, one of the largest and most important sectors of our economy. A strong case can be
made that the modernization of health-care IT systems would lead to better-coordinated, more
effective, and less costly patient care than we have today, including greater responsiveness of
medical practice to the latest research findings. Robots, lasers, and other advanced technologies are
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improving surgical outcomes, and artificial intelligence systems are being used to improve diagnoses
and chart courses of treatment. Perhaps even more revolutionary is the trend toward so-called
personalized medicine, which would tailor medical treatments for each patient based on information
drawn from that individual's genetic code. Taken together, such advances could lead to another jump
in life expectancy and improved health at older ages.
Other promising areas for the application of new technologies include the development of cleaner
energy--for example, the harnessing of wind, wave, and solar power and the development of electric
and hybrid vehicles--as well as potential further advances in communications and robotics. I'm sure
that I can't imagine all of the possibilities, but historians of science have commented on our collective
tendency to overestimate the short-term effects of new technologies while underestimating their
longer-term potential.
Finally, pessimists may be paying too little attention to the strength of the underlying economic and
social forces that generate innovation in the modern world. Invention was once the province of the
isolated scientist or tinkerer. The transmission of new ideas and the adaptation of the best new
insights to commercial uses were slow and erratic. But all of that is changing radically. We live on a
planet that is becoming richer and more populous, and in which not only the most advanced
economies but also large emerging market nations like China and India increasingly see their
economic futures as tied to technological innovation. In that context, the number of trained scientists
and engineers is increasing rapidly, as are the resources for research being provided by universities,
governments, and the private sector. Moreover, because of the Internet and other advances in
communications, collaboration and the exchange of ideas take place at high speed and with little
regard for geographic distance. For example, research papers are now disseminated and critiqued
almost instantaneously rather than after publication in a journal several years after they are written.
And, importantly, as trade and globalization increase the size of the potential market for new products,
the possible economic rewards for being first with an innovative product or process are growing
rapidly. In short, both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater
today than at any other time in history.
Well, what does all this have to do with creativity and critical thinking, which is where I started? The
history of technological innovation and economic development teaches us that change is the only
constant. During your working lives, you will have to reinvent yourselves many times. Success and
satisfaction will not come from mastering a fixed body of knowledge but from constant adaptation andcreativity in a rapidly changing world. Engaging with and applying new technologies will be a crucial
part of that adaptation. Your work here at Simon's Rock, and the intellectual skills, creativity, and
imagination that that work has fostered, are the best possible preparation for these challenges. And
while I have emphasized technological and scientific advances today, it is important to remember that
the arts and humanities facilitate new and creative thinking as well, while helping us to draw meaning
that goes beyond the purely material aspects of our lives. I wish you the best in facing the difficult but
exciting challenges that lie ahead. Congratulations.
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This Is The Steve
Jobs Email That Has
Apple In A Legal
Mess
9 Formulas You Must
Master To Pass The
CFA Exams
GUNDLACH: These
Are The 2 Most
Important Slides Of
2012
BILL GATES IS THE
RICHEST MAN IN
THE WORLD AGAIN
----
1. See Angus Maddison (2007), Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-
Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press), table A.7, p. 382.
2. Two important examples are Tyler Cowen (2011) and Robert J. Gordon (2010, 2012); the latter
reference, in particular, also contains a discussion of headwinds to growth beyond the prospects for
innovation. See Tyler Cowen (2011), The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging
Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton); Robert J.
Gordon (2010), "Revisiting U.S. Productivity Growth over the Past Century with a View of the Future,"
Leaving the Board NBER Working Paper Series 15834 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of
Economic Research, March); and Robert J. Gordon (2012), "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?
Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds," Leaving the Board NBER Working Paper Series
18315 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, August).
3. John M. Keynes (1931), "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930)," inEssays in
Persuasion (London: Macmillan), p. 358.
4. See Martin Neil Baily, James M. Manyika, and Shalabh Gupta (2013), "U.S. Productivity Growth:
An Optimistic Perspective," Leaving the Board International Productivity Monitor,Spring, pp. 3-12.
5. This tendency has been referred to as the first law of technology. On the potential impact of
genome sequencing, see Francis Collins (2010), "Has the Revolution Arrived?"Nature, vol. 464
(April), pp.674-75. For an accessible discussion of the possibilities for life expectancy, see Stephen
S. Hall (2013), "On beyond 100," National Geographic,May,
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/longevity/hall-text.
6. For a discussion of the economic models of growth that build in cumulative forces of knowledge
generation and the effects of expansion in the size of the market, see Charles I. Jones and Paul M.
Romer (2010), "The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital," Leaving
the Board American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, vol. 2 (January), pp. 224-45.
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Ben Bernanke
Summary
Ben Bernanke is the current Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve. He was chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.
He taught at Stanford's University School of Business from 1979 to 1985, before... More
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77 11Free Bernake Dollars 4 Banks on May 18, 11:43 AM said:
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Flag as OffensiveBernanke can take his unprecedented monetary accommodation and shove it.
Average Americans do not want your fascist adaptation and creativity.
ReplyReply
22 11
Flag as Offensive
DOODLE on May 18, 12:49 PM said:
YOUNG NEBULOUS DUMB WOMEN ARE EASIER TO BED-- THAT'S WHY THEY ARE CALLED NEUBILES. ALL THE
BOOKS WILL NOT TELL YOU "WHO's YOUR DADDY" the bird such a beautiful and confused creature flying from one placeto another-loving and pollinating where it wills--day and night-north or south--flying flying and that's the reason you will never know where or should
you care- where the bird has been--aka--the original" alfie" 1970- caine ? first name co
ReplyReply
11 00
Flag as Offensive
Robin Hood In Reverse or America Needs its Head Examined? on May 18, 1:00 PM said:
How much money did he give to his fellow Goldman bank buddies and Hampton hedge funders?
The fact is the law and regulations have not kept up with the criminal mindset?
If we used our intelligence and common sense we would prevent new types of financial instruments until regulations were developed. Instead
criminal use new technology to swipe a bundle and leave the tax payers holding the bag.
Bernanke's predecessor Greenspan has admitted causing a large part of the 2008 financial collapse. Now Uncle Ben plans to walk-away from his
money tree handouts and let someone else clean up his mess of Wall St Welfare Dependency (WSWD).
The root cause is the Fed's grotesquely distorted fiat money system and the lack of faith in it, especially in time of financial crisis. The more
leveraged it becomes the harder it becomes to go to hard or "safe" cash. The Achilles Heel of his Money Tree Game is all money is required to
always be invested in risky instruments like stocks. Further evidence is his stealth push to allow Money Market Funds to break-the-buck, paying
zero interest to savers and allowing bankers to set the price of oil, gas, world-wide interest rates. He even broke gold and silver savers.
Ben and his bankers have become the most powerful people in the world. Guilty or not, our "Dept of Justice" refuses to prosecute them as they
have become too-big-to-fail.
Quite a legacy cremating yourself god-like and above-the-law.
ReplyReply
00 00
Flag as Offensive
Andy Rodon May 18, 1:12 PM said:
Of course he's upbeat about innovation, since the U.S. government steals many of the most innovative ideas and then gives
them to loyal stooges (around the world), who by themselves are unable to innovate or create. Is this what he means by
"because of the Internet and other advances in communications, collaboration and the exchange of ideas take place at high speed and with little
regard for geographic distance"
It is one thing to exchange ideas, quite another to simply steal them.
ReplyReply
00 00
Flag as Offensive
on May 18, 1:27 PM said:
Just once, I'd like to hear a commencement speaker praised for saying "Congratulations! You've learned some stuff! Now go
out and use it." Instead, it's always so very cool to downgrade the value of content in favor of amorphous "think critically!
innovate!"
Over the course of my post-college life -- which isn't decades and decades, but isn't just a couple years, either -- I've used content from every
course I took in college except one. This includes general education requirements I loathed and barely showed up for.
My most useful skill at work this past week came from a freshman-level requirement in a major I dropped, and it would never, ever have shown up
eilonwy
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on a job description for my current job. But because I had LEARNED it, I was able to recognize a situation where it applied and apply it. If I'd relied
only on critical thinking and not had the specific skill, I'd either be content with a way kludgier solution or I'd still be trying to solve the problem in the
middle of next week. Content matters.
(The one course I've never found a use for is linear algebra. Maybe next week.)
ReplyReply
00 00
Flag as Offensive
sharncedar on May 18, 1:40 PM said:
"Between the days of the Roman Empire and when the Industrial Revolution took hold in Europe, the standard of living of the
average person throughout most of the world changed little from generation to generation."
And since the days of Volcker, in the era of the counterfeiters Greenspam and Bernanke, the standard of living of the average American went down.
For the first time since 18th century. The first time we see successive generations with lower standard of living. So... Mr. Liar Pants Bernanke, I
thought your wholesale counterfeting of triiions and hadnig ti out to a heriditary oligarchy was leading to all kinds of innovation. Where's that
innovation, you piece of garbage? You scum counterfeiter? Where is it? Facebook? Linked In?
Bernanke needs a Texas necktie. He should get worse than Sadam Hussein got. He should be disemboweld and left to die in the sun. we need to
invent new types of cruel executions for this guy. How darehe speak to anyone, how dare he open his mouth. He is a counterfeiter, he has presider
over the death of the American dream.
ReplyReply
11 00
Flag as Offensive
km4 on May 18, 4:07 PM said:
But Success And Satisfaction Will Come From Mastering a Fixed Ponzi scheme the Fed runs with TBTF Banks and juicing
the stock market with $85B/mo. for the benefit of the 1% elite
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