| Karl William Kapp | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 27, 1910 Königsberg, East Prussia, Imperial Germany |
| Died | April 4, 1976 (aged 65) Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia |
| Nationality | Germany United States |
| Occupation | scientist |
| Spouse | Lili Lore Masur |
Karl William Kapp (October 27, 1910 – April 4, 1976) was a German-American economist, one of the founders of Ecological economics[1] and one of the leading 20th century institutional economists. He was a strong opponent of the compartmentalization of knowledge in the social sciences in general.[2]
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Karl William Kapp was born in Königsberg in 1910 as son of August Wilhelm Kapp, who was a teacher of philosophy. He grew up during the epoch of Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. One of his teachers in secondary school was the poet Ernst Wiechert at the Hufengymnasium.[3] He studied 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 economics 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.[3] 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. End 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research as well as among the founding 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, Kroatia.