James K. Galbraith chaired the board of Economists for Peace and Security from 1996 to 2016 (www.epsusa.org) and directs the University of Texas Inequality Project (http://utip.lbj.utexas.edu). He was Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress 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 he served as an informal counselor to Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek Minister of Finance. In 2016 he advised the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.
Galbraith's 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);
- Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan, and the Economics of Empire (2006);
- Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View (with M. Berner) (2001);
- Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (1998);
- Macroeconomics (with W. Darity Jr.) (1992); and
- Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future (1989).
Galbraith studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and holds degrees from Harvard University (BA) and Yale University (MA, M.Phil, PhD). In 2010, he was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In 2014 he was co-winner with Angus Deaton of the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economics. He holds honorary degrees from the Université Pierre Mendes-France in Grenoble and from the Plekhanov University of Economics in Moscow.