On Sunday, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was back at Princeton, where he taught for many years, delivering a speech to this year’s graduating class. In line with his wry, understated character, Bernanke kept the speech light, joking that he recently wrote to the university, inquiring about the status of his leave of absence, only to receive a form letter saying that Princeton gets “many more qualified applicants for faculty positions than we can accommodate.”

The wisecrack appeared to confirm what is an open secret in Washington: Bernanke intends to retire from the Fed in January, when his second term comes to an end, despite the fact that he is only fifty-nine years old and appears to be in good health. He could easily have sought another term, and, despite the fact that he is nominally a Republican, President Obama might well have acceded to his request. His relationship with the Administration, forged during several years of crisis management, is cordial; the economic recovery is showing signs of picking up; and the nation’s banks, which just a few years ago seemed to be on the brink of collapse, are making record profits. Bernanke’s stock, like many others, is trading at a high.

Plenty of people in Bernanke’s position would choose to stay on and enjoy the good times that may lie ahead. Always something of a fish out of water in the nation’s capital, he appears to have had enough. In a famous history of economics, the late Robert Heilbroner described economists as “worldly philosophers.” Bernanke, who co-authored a popular textbook and then quit academia for a public life in which he led the Fed through the deepest slump since the nineteen-thirties, certainly fits the description. Is it any surprise if he seems a bit world-weary at times?

After introducing emergency lending policies that helped prevent collapse of the financial system, he was widely accused of doing Wall Street’s bidding. More recently, he has been rewarded for persisting in a policy of quantitative easing—essentially, pumping money into the bond markets—that is designed to reduce unemployment by constant carping from ideologues in the G.O.P., some of whom seem intent on getting rid of the Fed altogether. Compared to other advanced countries, the United States has recovered pretty well from the Great Recession, but you’d never guess that from listening to the Republicans, particularly the two Pauls, Ron and Rand. (“Economic forecasts are bleak,” Rand wrote in a typical message to his supporters earlier this year. “And Ben Bernanke and his cronies at the Federal Reserve are doing everything they can to make it WORSE—MUCH WORSE!”)

Practically every time Bernanke goes up to Capitol Hill, he gets it in the neck from conservative Republicans for bailing out the banks, stealing from the nation’s savers by keeping interest rates artificially low, or leading the U.S. down the inflationary road of Weimar Germany. Not that he necessarily listens to his critics anymore. “In regard to politics,” he said on Sunday, “I have always liked Lily Tomlin’s line, in paraphrase: ‘I try to be cynical, but I just can’t keep up.’ We all feel that way sometime. Actually, having been in Washington for almost eleven years… I feel that way quite a bit.”

In economics, too, Bernanke has had quite an education. Before giving up academia, he was a noted theorist, committed to the intellectual endeavor known as New Keynesian economics, which seeks to provide a rigorous microeconomic foundation for macroeconomics and economic policy. The New Keynesian project made some progress, much of which had little or nothing do with the economist John Maynard Keynes, but it failed to anticipate the ruinous boom-bust cycle that Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, in his first couple of years as Fed chairman, oversaw. Indeed, the message from Bernanke and his colleagues was that the economic cycle had been tamed.

Amid the wreckage of the global financial bust and the Great Recession, many economists sought to minimize the blow to their profession. Bernanke, who remains a member in good standing of the academic economists’ club, gave a couple of speeches along these lines, but it wasn’t clear whether his heart was really in it. At one point, he said that the old theories worked well in the good times but didn’t apply to the bad times, which is a bit like saying a medicine works until the patient gets sick.

In his commencement speech, he developed a similarly skeptical line, saying, “Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policy-makers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.” The main positive use of economic analysis, he went on, is preventative: it can be used to “kill ideas that are completely logically inconsistent or wildly at variance with the data. This insight covers at least ninety per cent of proposed economic policies.”

That jibe is reminiscent of Keynes. Despite his own theoretical efforts, J.M.K. was skeptical of grand systems. He valued practical knowledge, and he compared economists to dentists.

Over the years, I’ve criticized Bernanke for his refusal to acknowledge the housing bubble until it was too late, as well as for being tardy about tackling stubbornly high unemployment. At one point, I even suggested that Obama should have replaced him back in 2010. That was a bit harsh. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, taking all things together, the Fed chairman has shown himself to be a deft hand at filling cavities and dealing with other painful conditions. In recent times, particularly, he’s also shown a commendable regard for ordinary Americans who live a long way from Washington and Wall Street—the sort of folks he grew up with in Dillon, South Carolina. If, indeed, he has now decided to spend some time on the beach in Boca with his fellow retired and semi-retired molar extractors, he’s more than earned the rest.

Photograph by Rich Schultz/AP.