Karl William Kapp

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 End 1920s he started studying law and economics at the universities in Berlin and Königsberg. He continued his studies in London and at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, 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 a 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 had a fatal heart attack during a conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia.