Robert Chovanculiak

The wonderful thing about economics is that it recognizes truths about the world that laypeople cannot intuitively grasp, based on simple statements about human action. Consider two concepts: opportunity costs and marginal decision-making based on marginal benefits and costs. If you really understand these two concepts, then it must seem normal to you that there is such a thing as optimal environmental pollution.

The EU recently adopted a directive to tackle the gender pay gap by introducing new bureaucratic obligations for employers. Similarly, the EU is pushing on other issues in the fight for gender equality, for example in the area of the low proportion of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects, which reaches 33%. Consequently, women make up the same proportion (33%) of employees in technical sectors.

We all want higher wages for less work. This explains why the four-day working week is such a popular topic in the media. But it is even less of a justification for the emotions that run high when the subject is discussed. These, in turn, prevent rational argumentation and consideration of all the problems with this popular proposal.

A new regulatory avalanche is rolling in on entrepreneurs. The Ministry of Labour is about to implement the EU Gender Pay Directive. This introduces new bureaucratic obligations for entrepreneurs. They will have to inform about the criteria they apply when setting wages in the company and define the pay procedure so that the employee knows what he or she has to do to get higher pay.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said at Davos that Slovakia could become a country that will experiment with a four-day working week. It is a flattering topic and so several media immediately picked up on it.

A new movement called degrowth is being mentioned more and more often in the media around the world. The aim of this movement is to address current environmental challenges by abandoning the \'economic growth paradigm.\' However, life and humanity as we know it today exist only because of economic growth. We would not be dealing with the environment today without years, decades, and centuries of economic growth.

Education is like an enormous oceanic ship where no one can change the course quickly, even if everyone can see that they are heading for an iceberg. Enough politicians have been burned in Slovakia who have taken command, announced a new course, and started turning the steering wheel, but nothing happened to the ship.

Since 2006, most of the time Slovakia has been ruled by politicians who have emphasized the role of the welfare state. The concept of pre-election welfare packages has become more popular and has become an integral part of mainstream politics, regardless of the phase of the election cycle.

It makes a big difference whether the state directly funds the operation of restaurants or \"merely\" mandates the issuance of food stamps, or whether restaurants are funded by paying customers.

In Slovakia, we have a problem with the drain of the brightest young people to foreign universities. If we want to solve this problem, we need to know the causes. And we can only know these if we understand how higher education works and what its real added value is.