Scholars

Senior Scholar James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. He chairs the board of Economists for Peace and Security [epsusa.org] and directs the University of Texas Inequality Project [utip.lbj.utexas.edu]. He was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee in the early 1980s. From 1993 to 1997, he served as chief technical adviser to China’s State Planning Commission for macroeconomic reform, and in the first half of 2015 as an informal counselor to the Greek minister of finance.

Galbraith’s books include:

• Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (Yale University Press, 2016);
• Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016);
• The End of Normal:  The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (Simon & Schuster, 2014);
• Inequality and Instability:  A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (OUP, 2012);
• The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (Free Press, 2008);
• Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan, and the Economics of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
• Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View (with M. Berner; Cambridge University Press, 2001);
• Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (University of Chicago Press, 1998);
• Macroeconomics (with W. Darity Jr.; Houghton Mifflin, 1993); and
• Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future (Basic Books, 1989).

Galbraith studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, and holds degrees from Harvard University (BA) and Yale University (Ph.D.). In 2010, he was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the oldest honorific scientific academy in the world. In 2014, Galbraith was a co-winner with Angus Deaton of the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economics, and in 2020, he was a winner of the Veblen-Commons Award. In 2022 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences and in 2023 to the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. He is presently serving pro bono as Chair of the Palau Economic Advisory Group, a bilateral committee constituted in 2022 under the Compact of Free Association between the United States and the Republic of Palau.