01
Impact is not intention
A measure can be well meant and still weaken health, trust, resilience or ecological stability. The relevant question is what changes.
WHAT PRICES, REPORTS AND GROWTH OFTEN DO NOT SHOW
Profit and growth are not enough as a compass.
Wirkungsökonomie, or Impact Economy, asks what actually changes for people, ecosystems, institutions and democracy. Its target is positive net impact, not central control.
Impact is neutral and relational. It means an actual change in conditions. Intentions, reach, reports and promises are not yet impact.
The model distinguishes impact, impact potential and impact risk. Positive impact is assessed against the SDGs, Agenda 2030 and the broader SDG+ frame.
Harmful impact should no longer pay off.
Positive net impact should become economically relevant.
Impact instead of capital as the compass.
Core idea
A feedback model for real-world effects
Wirkungsökonomie keeps markets, ownership, competition and entrepreneurial freedom. It changes the feedback signal: decisions should learn from their actual effects on shared conditions.
02
Risk is part of impact
Impact potential is not the same as realized impact. Impact risk names plausible harm, uncertainty, rebound effects and system dependencies.
03
Net impact matters
Where a target value is needed, the model uses positive net impact: benefits minus relevant harms, without hiding critical damage in averages.
Impact governance
From measurement to feedback
Reporting alone does not change incentives. The crucial step is feedback: impact information must flow back into prices, taxes, budgets, capital allocation and public decisions.
Non-compensation
Critical harm cannot simply be offset by unrelated benefits. This protects ecological, social and democratic thresholds from being averaged away.
Reverse merit order
When choices are prioritized, the most harmful or least resilient options are addressed first, instead of rewarding them through hidden external costs.
Impact architecture
The model links indicators, feedback loops, governance rules and learning cycles. It is not a social-credit system and not a rating of people.
Impact fields
Where the model is applied
The German site already contains detailed public pages for fields such as education, health, climate and energy, products and consumption, finance, housing, media, democracy and science. The English layer starts here and will grow page by page.
For whom?
A shared language for different roles
Companies, investors, municipalities, journalism, science, education and citizens ask different questions. The model gives them a shared impact language without turning people into scores.
Markets and companies
Products, supply chains and business models can be assessed by their impact paths, risk exposure and contribution to resilience.
Policy and budgets
Public spending and regulation can be read as impact instruments: what conditions do they stabilize, weaken or transform?
Public communication
For media and language, the careful terms are impact potential, resonance space and impact path. Reach is not impact.
Public impact space
Debates also have impact paths
The public sphere shapes trust, fear, attention, solidarity and democratic capacity. Wirkungsökonomie does not police opinions. It asks which resonance spaces and feedback paths public communication opens.
Practice
Tools, demos and working models
Tools on this site are model-like drafts unless explicitly marked otherwise. They are learning instruments, not official ratings, legal advice or automatic decisions.
Learning
From concept to impact competence
Impact competence means understanding systems, sources, feedback and responsibility. The learning layer will be translated after the core English pages are stable.
Library
Documents remain in their original language for now
This English website layer does not translate documents, PDFs or working papers. The library remains available as the current German reference and publication space.
Next step
Build the English layer page by page
The German URLs stay as they are. English pages live below /en/. This page is the starting point for a structured multilingual rollout.