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Richard Layard’s „Happiness” deals with a paradox of the last 50 years – why people all around the world have become richer and healthier but no happier. The higher income people get, the less it increases their happiness. It can be explained by the law of diminishing marginal utility; each unit of income more provides less happiness because humans tend to adjust their standard to the current situation and a good considered to be a luxury in the past (ex. a car) becomes just ordinary when the income increases. The ability to habituate may be beneficial in a crisis situation (ex. there is war and humans have to get used to eat less) but it in a state of peace it creates a vicious cycle of constant escalation of needs and wants. “We will find neither national purpose nor personal sati...

Ignored as it may have been for the past few decades, inequality is a subject stirring much debate today. One of the reasons for that is a book published in 2013 by a French economist Thomas Piketty, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". All Piketty’s conclusions are induced from historical evidence which had been collected by Mr Piketty and his colleagues for over a decade. Growing wealth gap Alluding to a landmark book “Das Kapital” from 1867, Piketty has already been proclaimed “a modern Marx”. Whereas Marx urged that exploitation of labour force is the source for capitalists’ wealth accumulation, Piketty convinces that since wealth grows faster than economic output, over time the wealth gap between people who own wealth (with all its future returns) and people who don’t (th...