Karl William Kapp

Karl William Kapp ( born October 27, 1910 in Königsberg, † April 10, 1976 in Dubrovnik ) was a German political economist and published his major work Social Costs of the market economy, a political economy of the environment.

Life

Karl William Kapp was born in 1910 in Königsberg, East Prussia. Here he grew up at the time of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic in a humanist family and educational environment, to which the writer Ernst Wiechert counted. The study of political science Kapp led to the universities of Königsberg and Berlin. As early as 1933 emigrate Kapp and his future wife and co-author of multiple Lore Masur to Geneva, Switzerland. Especially Lores Jewish origin, but also of both humanistic consciousness and political attitudes were reasons for leaving the home country, which as Nazi Germany offered them no more security. In Geneva, both moving in the environment of the "Frankfurt School" who here spent their exile for a transitional period and Kapp wore with his dissertation "Plan Economy and Foreign Trade " (1936 ) for " planning debate" at. The emigrated to Columbia University and in the "Institute for Social Research " renamed "Frankfurt School" granted to Kapp's 1937 scholarship and therefore enabled the exile in the United States of America. Here Kapp worked a total of nearly three decades as a professor at Columbia University and New York University (1938-1945) and later as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut (1945-1950) and as a full professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York ( 1950-1965 ).

Between 1958 and 1964, the Kapp spent three research trips to India and the Philippines, where they laid the foundations for the development of ecological theory. In 1965, Kapp was given a professorship at the University of Basel as successor of the eminent political economist Edgar Salin, the Kapp called the European humanist in the tradition of Goethe and with which bound him a close correspondence. 1972-3 Kapp was a visiting professor in the led by Ignacy Sachs Research Group for Development Planning at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. The onset at that time general concern about the environmental and resource crisis led to the "discovery" of the work of Kapp and made ​​him a sought-after expert. Of importance here were his membership in the Committee of Experts on Development and the Environment of the United Nations, in 1972, prepared the environmental conference in Stockholm, and his role as chairman of the " Brandt Commission " to promote " environmentally friendly " technologies whose report was published in 1974. In 1976, Kapp died unexpectedly during a conference in Dubrovnik.

Since 1958, the author investigated the socio-environmental degradation in developing countries. Thus he used the published in his 1950 pioneering work on the economic costs ( " externalities ") of the market economy developed problem perspective and reasoned with the "eco -development " the forerunner of the "sustainable development".

Foundation and Kapp prices

Charles William and Lore L. Kapp Foundation was founded in 1977 to promote the humanization and integration of the social sciences within the meaning of the work of the couple and to edit and publish the estate. Since 2004, she gives at the annual meeting of the Association for Ecological Economics at two year intervals the Kapp Research Award for Ecological Economics. The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy awards annually in cooperation with the William Kapp Foundation for the best article in the EAEPE Theoretical Perspectives K. William Kapp Prize to.

Awards

Writings (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 of: The Social Costs of Private Enterprise, Harvard University Press, Cambridge / Massachusetts 1950.. ).
  • Government funding of "green " 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 of: Social costs of business enterprise, 1963/1978 ).
  • Renewal of the social sciences: An attempt to integrate and humanization. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-596-24161-8 ( translation: Toward a science of man in society, 1961).
  • (edited with Fritz Vilmar, employees of Helmut Schmidt) socialization of the losses? The social cost of a private system. Hanser, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-446-11577-3.

Literature on Kapp

  • Berger, Sebastian (2007) " K. William Kapp - social cost of őkonomischen development and the beginning of the ' Eco - development ' ," ONE - Development policy information North-South, 13-14-2007 July, pp. 70-72.
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