Professor James K. Galbraith holds prestigious Bentsen Chair

LBJ School Professor and economist James K. Galbraith was appointed to the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations in September. Known nationally and internationally for his work in macroeconomic policy and global inequality, Galbraith has been with the LBJ School since 1985.

Galbraith graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1974 and was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University the following year. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1981. He served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including executive director of the Joint Economic Committee in the early 1980s.

In the mid-1990s, Galbraith served for three years as chief technical adviser to the State Planning Commission of China on a United Nations Development Program project on macroeconomic reform—in effect becoming a senior adviser to the Chinese government. He is presently national board chair of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction, an organization concerned with conflict reduction, security, and development issues. Galbraith is also a senior scholar with the Levy Economics Institute in New York.

Galbraith has coauthored two books, Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future and Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay. He also has coauthored two textbooks, The Economic Problem and Macroeconomics, and has published nearly 70 academic articles and chapters in academic books. He coedited a book—Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View—that features contributions coauthored with six LBJ School Ph.D. students. A former coordinator of the LBJ School’s Ph.D. program, he is currently director of the UT Inequality Project.

A prolific public commentator, Galbraith has published many op-ed pieces in the New York Times as well as in Newsday, the Boston Globe, the Austin American-Statesman, and other newspapers. He writes regularly for the Texas Observer and occasionally for The American Prospect, The Nation, and Dissent. He reviews books for The Washington Monthly and other publications. He was for a time a columnist on TheStreet.com, and continues to make occasional commentaries for Public Radio International’s Marketplace.

Around the time Galbraith began his career on the staff of the U.S. Congress, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas indicated his intention to fund a professorship at the LBJ School. The UT System Board of Regents approved the Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr. Professorship in Public Affairs in 1973. In 1980, the Board of Regents elevated the endowment to the Lloyd Bentsen Chair in Business/Government Relations. Among the major donors were Senator Bentsen, the Houston Endowment, the M. D. Anderson Foundation, the Moody Foundation, Scurlock Oil, and the LBJ Family Foundation.

When the chair was established, Senator Bentsen expressed the hope that it would attract people with “professional experience.” He was not interested in using the chair to hire academics whose audience consisted primarily of other scholars.

“Professor Galbraith is a public intellectual in the tradition of his father, John Kenneth, and of our own Ray Marshall,” said LBJ School Dean Ed Dorn. “His ability to operate in the policymaking arena and to communicate with the general public make him an altogether fitting occupant for the chair.”

Past holders of the chair include former Federal Reserve Chairman G. William Miller (1984-85), Congressman Robert C. Krueger (1985-86), Ambassador Robert Strauss (1987-91), and Mary Beth Rogers (1992-93), who served as Texas Governor Ann Richards’ chief of staff.

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May 5, 2003
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