James K. Galbraith, professor of public affairs and government at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, has been elected to the “Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei,” also known as the Lincean Academy, the oldest honorific scientific academy in the world.
Founded in 1603, the academy counts Galileo Galilei among its original members and has remained an elite organization of only 540 members, with 180 of those from outside Italy.
Although the academy covers all scientific and literary fields, Galbraith will be a member of the division for moral, historical and philological sciences, specifically for the social and political sciences.
Robert Solow, Amartya Sen and the late Paul Samuelson are among the other American economists who have been a part of the academy.
Galbraith is the author of “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.” He is a senior scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security, a global professional network. His research in recent years has focused on the measurement of economic inequality and may be found at http://utip.gov.utexas.edu.
