Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

James K. Galbraith

Current professional statusFoto Galbraith
Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Chair in Government/ Business Relations, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and Professor, Department of Government

Biography

James K. Galbraith is currently the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Government and Business Relations and Professor of Economics at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds degrees from Harvard (B.A. magna cum laude, 1974) 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 as the Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1985 before joining the faculty at the University of Texas. From 1995 to 1997 he directed the LBJ School’s Ph.D. Program in Public Policy.  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 informal research group called the University of Texas Inequality Project with several of the school’s distinguished graduate students.

Dr. Galbraith maintains several outside connections, including serving as a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and as Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security. He writes a column for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation. He is an occasional commentator for Public Radio International's Marketplace.

Galbraith's new book is The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008). He is also author of Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future (1989) and Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (1998). Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View (Cambridge University Press, 2001), is coedited with Maureen Berner and features contributions from six LBJ School Ph.D. students. He has co-authored two textbooks, The Economic Problem with the late Robert L. Heilbroner and Macroeconomics with William Darity, Jr.