“Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.”

American economist

Ben Bernanke is an American economist and public policy figure, best known for serving as the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. He later became a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. Before leading the Fed, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired its Department of Economics from 1996 to September 2002, when he took public service leave. As chairman, he oversaw the Federal Reserve’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. In 2009, Time named him Person of the Year, and in 2022 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Douglas Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig for research on banks and financial crises, especially his analysis of the Great Depression.