Karl William Kapp

Karl William Kapp (October 27, 1910 - April 4 1976) was a German American economist is one of the founders of Ecological economics [Juan Martinez-Alier (1987), "Ecological Economics" Oxford: Blackwell.]

Biography

Karl William Kapp was born in Königsberg in 1910 as sohn of August Wilhelm Kapp, who was a teacher of philosophy. He grew up during the epoch of Emperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. One of his teachers in secondary school was the humanist and nature-loving poet Ernst Wiechert. [http://www.kwilliam-kapp.de/ Biographical Information K. William Kapp] , retrieved 15 April 2008.] He studies law and economics at the universities in Berlin and Königsberg, and later in London and Geneva. In 1933 he and his later wife Lili Lore Masur left Nazi-Germany for Geneva in Switzerland, where he got acquainted with the Frankfurt School. He received a Ph.D in marcoeconomics in Geneva with his dissertation „Planwirtschaft und Aussenhandel“.

In 1937 Kapp received a scholarship from the Frankfurt School which had emigrated and was now working out of Columbia University, New York City, under the name „Institute for Social Research. From 1938 to 1945 he was a instructor in Economics at the New York University and Columbia University in New York. From 1945 to 1950 he was Assistant Professor of Economics at the Wesleyan University in Middleton, Connecticut. From 1950 to 1965 he was Professor of Economics at the University of the City of New York. In 1965 he returned to Switzerland and was Professor of Economics at the University of Basel until 1976. In that time he was also a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris.

In 1976 Kapp suffers a deadly heart attack during a conference in Dubrovnik, Kroatia.

Work

Planning debate

With his dissertation „Planwirtschaft und Aussenhandel“ in 1936 Kapp contributed to the Planning Debate. His dissertation’s main result was that a planned economy is not doomed to autarky because there are ways to deal with the valuation problem so that trade and exchange with market economies can be organized. Kapp’s dissertation already demonstrated his interest in issues that are characteristic for his later work: alternative accounting methods, accounting problems in market economies, the valuation of substantive human needs and environmental pollution.

Social costs approach

The Social Costs approach to the globalised capitalist market economy has gained new relevance in recent years. The present situation is one of widespread and increasing deterioration of the social, cultural, democratic, and environmental frameworks of advanced capitalist market societies. The view is originally suggested by Karl William Kapp's seminal evolutionary open-systems approach is that these processes and problems are the outcome of a widening gap between private individualist economic, and societal values. [Wolfram Elsner; Pietro Frigato; Paolo Ramazzotti (2006), "Social Costs and Public Action in Modern Capitalism Essays Inspired by Karl William Kapp's Theory of Social Costs". ISBN 978-0-415-41351-0 ]

General Systems Theory

Since the late 1960s Kapp increasingly applied Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s open systems theory for the conceptualization of the development process, and integrated this with N. Georgescu-Roegen’s conceptualization of the economic process as an entropic transformation process since the 1970s.

See also

* European Association for Evolutionary and Political Economy
* Ignacy Sachs

Publications

* 1936, "Planwirtschaft und Aussenhandel", Liége.
* 1936, "Planwirtschaft und Außenhandel", Genève : Georg & Cie.
* 1950, "The Social Costs of Private Enterprise", Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press
* 1958, "Volkswirtschaftliche Kosten der Privatwirtschaft". Tübingen : Mohr (Siebeck).
* 1972, "Sozialisierung der Verluste?". München : Hanser.
* 1975, "Neue Wege für Bangladesh". Hamburg : Inst. f. Asienkunde
* 1976, "Staatliche Förderung "umweltfreundlicher" Technologien". Göttingen : Schwartz. ;About Karl William Kapp
* Eyup Ozveren (2007)"Where disciplinary boundaries blur"
* Tommaso Luzzati (2007), "Ecological economics and the legacy of Karl William Kapp"
* Antonio G. Calafati (2007), "Karl W. Kapp's Scientific Research Programme"
* Richard Gaskins (2007), "Public Control of Risk and Responsibility: A Second Look at Kapp's Theory of Social Cost"
* Otto Steiger, Rolf Steppacher (2007), "Sustainable Development and Property Rights: K. William Kapp's critical perspective on development in relation to Heinsohn and Steiger's property economics".

References

External links

* [http://www.kwilliam-kapp.de/index.html K. William Kapp Research Center]