Perfil

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and a professorship in Government at The University of Texas at Austin.  He was Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress in the early 1980s, and before that, an economist for the House Banking Committee. He chaired the board of Economists for Peace and Security from 1996 to 2016, and was a managing editor of Structural Change and Economic Dynamics from 2010 to 2024.  He has advised the State Planning Commission in China (1993-97), The Finance Ministry in Greece (2015), and is presently serving pro bono as Chair of the bilateral Economic Advisory Group to the Republic of Palau.

He holds degrees from Harvard University (AB, magna cum laude), in economics from Yale University (MA, M.Phil, PhD), and academic honors from universities in Ecuador, France and the Russian Federation. He is a Marshall Scholar (Kings College, Cambridge), a Fulbright and Carnegie awardee, a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Texas Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of the national academies of Italy, Portugal and Russia.  A major line of research addresses the measurement of inequality. 

Most recent book:  James Galbraith and Jing Chen, Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production. The University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Previous books include: Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (2016); Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016); The End of Normal:  The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (2014); Inequality and Instability:  A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (2012); The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008).