James K Galbraith holds the Lloyd M Bentsen, junior chair of Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin, and a professorship in Government. He is a senior scholar with the Levy Economics Institute, and chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security, an international association of professional economists.

He is the author of seven books and several hundred scholarly and policy articles. His books include The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (Free Press 2008) and Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan 2006). He writes a column for Mother Jones, and contributes to The American Prospect, the Nation, and the Texas Observer. He acted as an advisor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.

Jamie holds degrees from Harvard and Yale (PhD in Economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and later served on the staff of the US Congress, including as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee, before joining the faculty of the University of Texas. 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, while his policy writing ranges from monetary policy to the economics of warfare.