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John_Maxwell_IV comments on What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity? - Less Wrong
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Note that both graphs have a log scale as their x-axis. It's pretty standard for economists, psychologists, etc. to suggest that humans have a logarithmic utility for money (i.e. your happiness is proportionate to the number of digits in your bank balance, so giving away 90% of your capital and reducing that number of digits by 1 has only a marginal impact on your happiness level). I think the statement "money is not a good way to buy happiness" captures the intuition behind logarithmic utility for money fairly well.
(Also note that the article does not dispute my claim that money is not a good way to buy happiness. It just notes the lack of an asymptote in the utility curve.)
What does it mean for humans to have logarithmic utility for money? Do we have a measurable quantitative concept of utility that's natural enough that it would be silly to pull stuff like "utility2= log utility1, now humans have linear utility2 for money"!
The main ways to get a handle on this are to use subjective well-being scores (which is what those graphs do, and is somewhat questionable as to whether it's a natural unit), or to ask people about trade-offs or gambles they'd make (to elicit preferences as in a vN-M utility function). Both approaches lead to data saying it's approximately logarithmic, and there are also some theoretical reasons to think this is roughly right.