Biographical Information K. William Kapp
K. William Kapp's book "The Social Costs of Private Enterprise" was one of the first economic treatise that called attention to the ecological and social external costs of the market economy. His book is considered one of the origins of and a foundation for ecological economics.
Born in 1910 in Königsberg, Ostpreußen (today: Kaliningrad, Russia), Kapp grew up during the epoch of Emperial Germany and the Weimarer Republic. One of his teachers in secondary school, the “Hufgymnasium”, was the humanist and nature-loving poet E. Wiechert. Later, Kapp studied “state science” (Staatswissenschaft: consisting of law and economics) at the universities of Berlin and Königsberg. As early as 1933, Kapp and Lili Lore Masur, his later wife and co-author left Nazi-Germany for Geneva (Switzerland), mainly because of Lore’s Jewish background and their humanist consciousness and political attitude. In Geneva they were acquainted with the Frankfurt School that temporarily exiled in Switzerland and Kapp contributed to the Planning Debate with his dissertation „Planwirtschaft und Aussenhandel“ (1936). 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.
