Karl William Kapp (October 27, 1910 – April 4, 1976) was a German-American economist and Professor of Economics at the City University of New York and later the University of Basel. Kapp's main contribution was the development of a theory of social costs that captures urgent socio-ecological problems and proposes preventative policies based on the precautionary principle. His theory is in the tradition of various heterodox economic paradigms, such as ecological economics,

Marxian economics Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a Heterodox economics, heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx, Karl Marx's Critique of political economy#Marx's critique of politic ...

social economics Socioeconomics (also known as social economics) is the social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. In general it analyzes how modern societies progress, stagnate, or regress because of their ...

, and

institutional economics Institutional economics focuses on understanding the role of the Sociocultural evolution, evolutionary process and the role of institutions in shaping Economy, economic Human behavior, behavior. Its original focus lay in Thorstein Veblen's instin ...

. As such, Kapp's theory of social costs was directed against neoclassical economics and the rise of neoliberalism. He was an opponent of the compartmentalization of knowledge and championed, instead, the integration and humanization of the social sciences.

Biography

Kapp was born in Königsberg in 1910 as son of August Wilhelm Kapp, who was a teacher of physics. In secondary school at the ''Hufengymnasium'' one of his teachers was the poet

Ernst Wiechert Ernst Wiechert (18 May 1887 – 24 August 1950) was a German teacher, poet and writer. Biography Wiechert was born in the village of Kleinort, East Prussia, (now Piersławek, Poland). He was one of the most widely read novelists in Germany ...

Biographical Information K. William Kapp
retrieved 15 April 2008. End 1920s he started studying law and economics at the universities in Berlin and Königsberg. He continued his studies in London and at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where in 1936 he received a Ph.D in economics with his dissertation „Planwirtschaft und Aussenhandel“. In Geneva Kapp had met the people of the Frankfurt School, who emigrated to the US and settled as ''Institute for Social Research'' at the Columbia University, New York City. In 1937 they granted Kapp a scholarship. From 1938 to 1945 he was an 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. He was among the first members of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). 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 suffered a fatal heart attack during a conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Work

Kapp's research interests ranged from economics, sociology, policy making and environmental science to the theory of knowledge, the history of economic thought, and many related topics.Karl William Kapp 1910–1976, Obituary
in ''Journal of Economic Issues'' (1976), nr 09.

Planning debate

In his 1936 dissertation ''Planwirtschaft und Aussenhandel'' contributed to the debate around the economic calculation problem, a criticism of central economic planning. This problem was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in 1920, expounded by Friedrich Hayek and further debated in the 1920s and 1930s. Kapp argued that a

planned economy A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, part ...

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".

Publications

* 1936, ''Planwirtschaft und Außenhandel'', Genève : Georg & Cie. * 1950, ''The Social Costs of Private Enterprise'', Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press * 1963, ''The Social Costs of Business Enterprise'' * 1961, ''Towards a Science of Man in Society – A Positive Approach towards the Integration of Social Knowledge'' * 1958, ''Volkswirtschaftliche Kosten der Privatwirtschaft''. Tübingen : Mohr (Siebeck). * 1975, ''Neue Wege für Bangladesh''. Hamburg : Inst. f. Asienkunde * 1976, ''Staatliche Förderung "umweltfreundlicher" Technologien''. Göttingen : Schwartz. * 2011, ''The Foundations of Institutional Economics – by K. William Kapp, edited by Sebastian Berger and Rolf Steppacher''. Routledge.

References

External links

K. William Kapp Research Center
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kapp, Karl William 1910 births 1976 deaths Writers from Königsberg University of Königsberg alumni Humboldt University of Berlin alumni Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies alumni German economists Sustainability advocates Wesleyan University faculty Ecological economists 20th-century American economists German emigrants to the United States