James K. Galbraith is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute. He 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. 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 in social studies from Harvard University (A.B.), in economics from Yale University (M.A., M. Phil., Ph.D.), and three honorary degrees. He is a Marshall Scholar (King’s 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 scientific academies of Italy, Portugal, and Russia. His major line of research addresses the measurement of economic inequality. His most recent book, written with Jing Chen, is Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production (2025).