Presentation

In the early 1950s, K. William Kapp showed that private enterprises transfer some of their social and environmental costs to the entire society. His argumentation was ahead of its time, unwelcomed as Europe and the United States entered an era of mass consumption. In this book, a major contribution to political economy, the author carries out a systematic analysis of the various social costs, demonstrating that they are not isolated phenomena : pollution, unemployment, work accidents, planned obsolescence, all results from the same mechanism in which enterprises discharge themselves of their own responsibilities.

K. William Kapp offers thus a theory of the costs that challenges then-conventional wisdom and sketches a fundamental critic of the traditional economic analysis. Translated into many languages, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise strikes by the prophetic lucidity of its analysis and the relevancy of its theoretical tools.

With the prefaces of Ignacy Sachs and Jacques Richard.

Biography of the author

Karl William Kapp (1910-1973) is a German and American economist. Often considered as one of the founding father of ecological economy, he is also one of the figures of institutionalist economy. He was a lecturer at New York, Columbia and Basel universities and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of High Studies in Social Sciences, EHESS) in France.