海角大神

鈼� I鈥檓 just going to come out and say this: I鈥檓 no expert in economic policy.

I look at the economic crisis that began in 2007, and has puttered along ever since, and I think, sheesh, I鈥檓 glad I鈥檓 not the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Being Ben Bernanke 鈥� the current Federal Reserve chairman 鈥� has to be the second-toughest job in the world, after Being Barack Obama. Mr. Bernanke gets begrudging credit for bailing out the US banking system and protecting the savings of millions of Americans. And because he is so powerful, pulling those magical financial levers like the Great and Powerful Oz, he gets blamed for almost everything else, such as a sluggish recovery, high unemployment, and for some hard-core believers in an unfettered free market, for simply being the chairman of the Federal Reserve. 聽

In the April edition of The Atlantic, Roger Lowenstein has an excellent profile of Bernanke and his achievements and failures, provocatively entitled "The Villain." A lot of it has to do with the fact that fixing the US and the global economy is painful, and we blame the guy we think is responsible for it. But while Bernanke has become a political target for both the left and the right, a closer look at his record shows that he has done a remarkable job in restoring a sense of order and faith to a market that was threatening to come apart.

鈼� As a boy growing up in a mainly Hispanic border town in Texas, I always envied my bilingual friends who learned Spanish in their homes, who griped about the Dallas Cowboys in Spanish at the dinner table, who could start jokes in English and then deliver up the tasty punchline 鈥� to my chagrin 鈥� in Spanish. For all the talk of 鈥渟aving American culture,鈥� these were kids who had assimilated to American culture, but were able to operate in two worlds at once.

I knew they were smarter than me, just because of their grades and their admission to Ivy League schools. But now science tells me why.

In The New York Times, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes on how learning a second language at an early age makes your brain work better. Psychologists once worried that kids who lived in bilingual households faced obstacles that 鈥渉indered a child鈥檚 academic and intellectual development.鈥� Turns out they were right, and that very hindrance turns out to be an advantage.

鈼� And finally, here are a few words about God, or gods.

In New Scientist magazine 鈥� not your usual source for matters of evangelism 鈥� Ara Norenzayan writes that religion is a key ingredient for small hunter-gatherer societies to become larger civilizations. When you are related to everyone in your group, it is easy to resolve conflicts and to regulate behavior. But what if you live in a larger society, where you have no personal or tribal relationship with your neighbor?

For most civilizations, the answer was to form a common belief system, and most importantly, an all-knowing God who would ensure that everyone behaved themselves, even if their neighbor wasn鈥檛 watching.