James Galbraith

The World Economy

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Chair of Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin.

He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale (Ph.D. in economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge in 1974-1975, and then served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1985. He directed the LBJ School's Ph.D. Program in Public Policy from 1995 to 1997. He held a Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Lectureship in China in the summer of 2001 and was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003.

His recent research has focused on the measurement and understanding of inequality in the world economy, and leads an informed research group called the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal with several of the school’s distinguished graduate students.

His books are “Balancing Acts :Technology, Finance and the American Future” (Basic, 1989), “Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay” (Free Press, 1998), and “Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View” (Cambridge, 2001), co-edited with Maureen Berner. His latest book is “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.”

Galbraith is a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security, a global professional network. He writes a column called “Econoclast” for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation. He is also an occasional commentator for Public Radio International’s Marketplace.