Economics Expert Galbraith to Discuss Fiscal Crisis
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — James K. Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in government/business relations and professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, will discuss the recent economic crisis and reactions to it."The Great Crisis and the Dismal Failure" will be held Monday, Sept. 21, at 7:30 p.m. in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall on the Williams College campus.
A group of experts associated with the Economists for Peace and Security and the Initiative for Rethinking the Economy met recently in Paris to discuss financial and monetary issues; their viewpoints, summarized at here by Galbraith, are largely at odds with the global political and economic establishment.
Despite noting some success in averting a catastrophic collapse of liquidity and a decline in output, the Paris group was pessimistic that there would be sustained economic recovery and a return of high employment. Rather, they said, the crisis exposes the need for profound reform to meet a range of physical and social objectives.
Galbraith also chairs the board of Economists for Peace and Security and is director of the University of Texas Inequality Project. He is a former executive director of the Joint Economic Committee and was an architect of the modern procedures of congressional monetary policy oversight. From 1993 to 1997, he served as chief technical adviser to China's State Planning Commission as part of a UNDP project on macroeconomic reform.
He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale (doctorate in economics, 1981). He studied as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, from1974 to 1975.
Galbraith's most recent book is "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too" (2008). He writes a column for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect and The Nation.
His talk at Williams is sponsored by the Class of '71 Public Affairs Forum and is the first in the three-part series at Williams College on the Future of Capitalism.
