The Ethical Capital Investment App offers you the opportunity to invest in mainstream corporations, such as Ikea, Siemens or American Waters, that have a positive impact on the world. This positive impact is sometimes hard to see, and thus we have taken a lot of effort to measure it accurately using the theory of happiness economics.

Specifically, we are not using one but two different methods to assess the impact:

• The Goal Impact Score (GIS)
  
• The Decentralized Impact Score (DIS)

The Goal Impact Score (GIS) works mostly from the UN Sustainable development goals with a few differences. We extend this framework by a four goals that are not part of the SDG, but that we and our investors care about:

• Animal Welfare
  
• Freedom
• Religious Values
• LGBT RIghts

In addition, we recognize that every person prioritizes different values and so we have a quiz to help you see how you can make the world a better place through your investments. Take the quiz here!

The Decentralized Impact Score (DIS) is based on happiness economics and our own new approach to measuring social impact as explained in our whitepaper.

Happiness economics says that the goal of economics is to achieve maximum world happiness. Any economic activity that does not lead to that is a market failure. How much a market failure tells us how much social cost there is or lack of social good. Read our whitepaper for more!

Economics is a social science concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. In the past basic economics only assumed that the goal of a society is to increase total wealth.

However, this neglects the fact that wealth does not have a clear correlation to happiness especially not when the wealth level is already high. Happiness Economics supposes that the goal of a society is to increase the overall happiness of its members, even if an increase in happiness means a decrease in wealth.

Related to Happiness Economics, Social Capitalism is a socially-minded form of capitalism, where the goal is making social improvements, rather than focusing on accumulating capital. It is capitalism with a social purpose.

At Ethical Capital we strongly believe in the power of capitalism to create wealth and happiness. However, we also know that it leads to major social problems, such as extreme economic inequalities. So using the concept of happiness economics we do not value wealth creation by itself but happiness creation.