Karl William Kapp’s Self-Censorship in The Social Costs? The Hidden Thread from the Socialist Calculation Debate to Ecological Economics

Karl William Kapp is best known as a critic of the harms caused by a capitalist economy (through his 1950 book The Social Costs of Private Enterprise), but also, increasingly, as one of the founders of Ecological Economics (if not as an institutional figure, at least as an intellectual one) and of the very concept of ecological planning. However, it is striking to note that even though The Social Costs is a continuation of a strand from his 1936 PhD thesis, not only is it the most moderate one—drawing on Pigou—but it is also not the main strand through which Kapp would contribute to the theoretical founding of Ecological Economics. His contribution on the matter lies in a complex second strand, which begins with his PhD thesis and extends through short general texts on planning, development economics in India, texts on new indicators following the emergence of new ecological concerns in the 1970s, and finally the study of environmental planning in China. My hypothesis, connected to the theme of the conference, is that, as a German intellectual in exile in the US in the 1950s, Kapp could not strongly advocate for planning within the American political context (as the various drafts of the introduction to The Social Costs show), hence the fact that he opted for a rather mild critique instead of focusing on finding conceptual tools to analyze every type of economy, including socialist planned economies, in order to promote socialist planned economies—that is, the objective of the second strand. This hypothesis might also explain why Kapp gradually moved away from the first edition of The Social Costs (1950) to the point of acknowledging that the first edition relied on a Marshallian concept of social cost as an externality.