Op-Eds

On Jan. 1, 2012, almost every working American will be hit with the biggest tax increase of his or her lifetime. That’s when the Social Security payroll tax will revert to its pre-2009 rate of 6.2 percent, from 4.2 percent now.

Early in the days of my work on the measurement of experience, I saw Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.” Known for its gorgeous music, it is also a moving story of the love between a young aristocrat and Violetta, a woman of the demimonde.

Take a look at the photos of two pairs of eyes, and take note: Your heartbeat accelerated when you looked at the left-hand figure. In fact, it accelerated even before you could label what is so eerie about the picture.

We’ve all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of metal to buy things, it’s easy to forget that coins arrived quite late in the history of the world. For more than 2,000 years, states ran complex economies and international-trading networks without a coin to hand.

In 1738, the Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli argued that a gift of 10 ducats has the same utility to someone who already has 100 ducats as a gift of 20 ducats to someone whose current wealth is 200 ducats.

I was the first non-German since 1933 to head Coca-Cola in stoic, sophisticated West Germany, which was then vying with Japan to be the company’s largest international division. As division president of Central Europe, I also had Switzerland and Austria under my auspices. But Germany was the focus.

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters overconfidence.

Coca-Cola was losing the Philippines, where failure might have been the beginning of the end of our global business. By 1981, the nation was the world’s 10th-largest soft-drink market, but Pepsi had a 2-to-1 market share and the Coke bottler, owned by the Soriano family’s San Miguel Corp., warned that it could no longer sustain its losses unless Coke shared the burden.

Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions is primarily a political problem, rather than a technological one. This fact was well illustrated by the fate of the 2009 climate bill that barely passed the U.S. House of Representatives and never came up for a vote in the Senate.

The death of Muammar Qaddafi is a cause for joy in Libya, and for concern. Some worry that the ruling National Transitional Council will force its way to permanent power; others that Islamist elements will seek to put the country under Shariah law; and there is also the danger of the nation splitting into three parts.