James K Galbraith

Professor, Dept. of Government, The University of Texas at Austin

James K Galbraith is the son of renowned American economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He attended Harvard, Cambridge and Yale Universities before serving in several positions on the staff of the US Congress, including Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. In 1985, he was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He then moved to the University of Texas at Austin and is currently Lloyd M Bentsen Jr Chair at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs and Professor at the Department of Government. He also directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal research group based at the LBJ School.

Galbraith has published a number of books, including Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future (1989), Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (1998) and most recently The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008). He also writes a column for Mother Jones and often contributes articles to the Texas Observer, the American Prospect and the Nation, as well as Op-Eds for many national papers.