Karl William Kapp

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Karl William Kapp (born October 27, 1910 in Königsberg ; died April 10, 1976 in Dubrovnik ) was a German economist and founded a political economy of the environment with his major work, Social Costs of the Market Economy.

Life

Karl William Kapp was born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1910. Here he grew up during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic in a humanistic family and educational environment, which also included the writer Ernst Wiechert . He studied political science at the universities of Königsberg and Berlin. As early as 1933, Kapp and his future wife and multiple co-author Lore Masur emigrated to Geneva , Switzerland. Above all, Lore's Jewish origins, but also both humanistic awareness and political attitudes, were reasons to leave their homeland, which as Nazi Germany no longer offered them security. In Geneva both moved in the vicinity of the “ Frankfurt School ”, which spent a transitional period in exile here, and Kapp contributed to the “planning debate” with his dissertation “Planned Economy and Foreign Trade” (1936). The “Frankfurt School”, which emigrated to Columbia University and renamed the “Institute for Social Research”, granted the Kapps a scholarship in 1937, thus enabling exile in the United States of America . Here Kapp worked a total of nearly three decades as a lecturer at Columbia University and New York University (1938-1945) and later as an assistant professor of Wesleyan University in Connecticut (1945-1950) and as a professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (1950-1965).

Between 1958 and 1964 the Kapps spent three research stays in India and the Philippines , during which they laid the foundation for ecological development theory. In 1965, Kapp received a call to the University of Basel as the successor to the important political economist Edgar Salin , whom Kapp described as a European humanist in the tradition of Goethe and with whom he was in close correspondence. From 1972-3 Kapp was visiting professor in the research group on development planning led by Ignacy Sachs at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. The general concern about the environmental and resource crisis that set in at this time led to the "discovery" of Kapp's work and made him a sought-after expert. Of particular importance here were his membership in the expert committee on development and environmental issues of the United Nations , which prepared the 1972 environmental conference in Stockholm , and his function as chairman of the “Brandt Commission” for the promotion of “environmentally friendly” technologies, the report of which was published in 1974 . In 1976, Kapp died unexpectedly during a conference in Dubrovnik.

The author has been investigating socio-ecological degradation in developing countries since 1958. Thus he used the problem perspective developed in his pioneering work published in 1950 on the economic costs (“external effects”) of the market economy and founded the forerunner of “sustainable development” with “eco-development”.

“Karl William Kapp - a left-liberal German economist who taught in Switzerland and the USA for a long time [...] influenced the economic policy debate primarily with his thesis that material prosperity by no means naturally leads to a high“ quality of life ”. Like Erich Fromm , Max Horkheimer or Ivan Illich , he doubted the naive belief in progress of the "economic boom". He suggested deducting expenses for the repair of environmental and health damage from the national product - with a view to cancer from exhaust gases, polluted drinking water or the destruction of the landscape, for example. But Kapp did not only see the "follow-up costs" of the consumer frenzy. His thoughts on efficiency losses due to business competition still seem worth discussing. He dealt with possibly superfluous "parallel" activities of companies, especially in research and marketing. Above all, he emphasized a technologically unjustified destruction of capital through competition - namely the devaluation of high-performance machines and other production facilities up to the closure of entire companies, especially in the recurring macroeconomic crises. "

- Winfried Roth

Foundation and Kapp Prizes

The Karl William and Lore L. Kapp Foundation was established in 1977 to promote the humanization and integration of the social sciences in line with the work of the couple and to edit and publish the estate . Since 2004, she has awarded the Kapp Research Prize for Ecological Economy at the annual conference of the Association for Ecological Economy every two years . The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy , in collaboration with the William Kapp Foundation, awards the K. William Kapp Prize annually for the best article within the EAEPE Theoretical Perspectives .

Awards

  • 1952/53: Grant Fund for the Advancement of Education , Ford Foundation.
  • 1957/58: Fulbright Research Professor , Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona , India.
  • 1961/62: Fulbright Professor , University of Rajasthan , Jaipur , India.
  • 1964: Rockefeller Visiting Professor , University of the Philippines , Dilima-Manila, Philippines.
  • 1971: Consultant, United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm 1972.

Fonts (selection)

  • Planned economy and foreign trade. Vaillant-Carmanne, Liége 1936 (dissertation, University of Geneva, 1936).
  • Economic costs of the private sector. Mohr (Siebeck), Tübingen 1958 (German translation from: The Social Costs of Private Enterprise. Harvard University. Press, Cambridge / Massachusetts 1950).
  • State support for “environmentally friendly” technologies. Schwartz, Göttingen 1976, ISBN 3-509-00854-5 ( Commission for Economic and Social Change. Vol. 74).
  • Social costs of the market economy: The classic work of environmental economics. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-596-24019-0 (translation from: Social costs of business enterprise , 1963/1978).
  • Renewal of the Social Sciences: An Attempt at Integration and Humanization. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-596-24161-8 (translation from: Toward a science of man in society , 1961).
editor

literature

  • Berger, Sebastian (2007) "K. William Kapp - Social Costs of Economic Development and the Beginning of 'Eco-Development'", EINS - Development Policy Information North-South, July 13-14-2007, pp. 70–72.
  • Karin Knottenbauer: Kapp, Karl William. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Adler – Lehmann. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 302-307.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Wichers : Karl William Kapp. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . October 28, 2013 , accessed July 8, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Winfried Roth : The costs of competition. In Deutschlandfunk on time issues from January 13, 2018.
  3. ^ Karl William and Lore L. Kapp Foundation on moneyhouse.ch, accessed on February 21, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Kapp, Karl William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kapp, William (short name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economist
DATE OF BIRTH October 27, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Königsberg (Prussia)
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1976
Place of death Dubrovnik