The Prisoners’ Dilemma and Congress

As I write this, our Congress is locked in an argument, unable to reach an agreement over an infrastructure bill.  Since the Democratic Party has a majority in both chambers, this would seem to be a fairly simple objective, but the failure of the party to do so reminds me of a classic example of game theory:  The Prisoners’ Dilemma.

Note.  I usually try—most likely unsuccessfully—to keep my own political opinions out of this blog.  While I have strong, and probably strange, political opinions, I have never thought my beliefs were neither terribly interesting nor any of the readers’ business.  Strangely, I routinely receive letters from people across the political spectrum who have somehow managed to read between the lines and discover my “hidden” support of everything from the Masons to the Flat Earth Society.   Sorry, but I’m not Lawrence Block’s Evan Tanner, and most people would find my real political opinions rather boring.

In the Prisoners' Dilemma, imagine that the sheriff has arrested two men for a suspected bank robbery.  When he searched their car, while he discovered no evidence of the robbery, he did find two stolen handguns.  Though the sheriff cannot arrest them on the bank robbery, he can prosecute each for the stolen handgun.  

The sheriff is crafty and unwilling to let settle for just charging the two suspects with the firearms charge, so he separates the two men where they cannot communicate with each other, and makes each the same offer.

“All right, scumbag,” says the sheriff.  “We both know that you and your partner robbed the bank, but I can’t prove it.  So, here’s the deal I’m offering both of you.  If you confess and give evidence against your partner, I’ll let you go and your partner gets ten years in jail.  If he confesses, I’ll let him go and you can rot in jail for ten years.  If you both confess, I’ll prosecute both of you, and you can spend the next decade in jail together.  But if neither of you talks, I’ll prosecute both of you for the stolen firearm and you’ll both spend a year in jail.”

Clearly, the best possible outcome for the two criminals is each man to keep his mouth shut, hope that “honor among thieves” is not a myth and that his partner will also keep quiet so that each man will only spend a single year in jail.  Game theorists have a name for this, the Coase Theorem, that states that if two parties are allowed to trade freely, and in this case, it is information that they are trading, they will eventually reach an efficient outcome.

Our two criminals (let’s call them A and B since that’s easier to label on a graph) can’t communicate, and without information, each has to develop his own optimum output.  Put more simply, each man has two choices, either to talk or to remain silent, and there are only four possible outcomes, as shown on the chart to the right.  The best outcome for each man is for him to talk and hope his partner does not, and while spending only a single year in jail is better than being jailed for ten years, there is no ‘good’ outcome if he remains silent.

Since each of the two men is likely to calculate his outcomes the same way, and since the only possibility of escaping jail time is to talk, it is most likely that both men will accept the sheriff’s offer and talk, triggering the worst possible outcome for each:  serving ten years in jail.

This is exactly what is happening right now in Washington concerning the president’s new infrastructure plan (the exact details of which change almost hourly).  Since the Democratic margin in both houses is very thin, the only possibility of the bill’s being passed is for several special interest groups within the party to work together and reach a compromise.  

Theoretically, since the Democrats have a majority, all that would be necessary to pass legislation is to use Coase Theorem, negotiate among themselves, and reach an efficient outcome.  Our elected officials, unlike the two prisoners, are allowed to actually talk among themselves, and reach a compromise.   In reality, however, both parties are made up of small special interest groups, each interested more in securing legislation favorable to their group than in passing a compromise bill.  And since a large part of the communication is being done by press releases and publicized sound bites, it is not really a negotiation.

Because of the upcoming election, there is the added element of the Democrats’ desiring a legislative victory before voting begins.  The closer we get to the election, the more power this gives to a group demanding amendments to the proposed bill, and each such amendment makes the bill more unpalatable to the party as a whole.  Since there is a thin margin in both houses, the defection of even a few members negates the possibility of passing any legislation.

Unlike the Prisoners’ Dilemma, Congress has multiple participants, each seeking his own optimum efficient outcome.  There are powerful incentives against cooperation even within a party.  Opposition brings the reward of increased press exposure, the opportunity to attract more voters interested in the special interests you represent, and the very real likelihood that your party will offer you more economic carveouts for your constituents.  

You can test this yourself.  I’m fairly sure that most of us can name Democrats opposed to the proposed legislation.  Other than congressional leadership, can you name any of Democrats who have supported the legislation?  You probably cannot, and with each additional player, game theory says it is even more unlikely that any large spending bill can be passed.  If you ignore the press announcements, and just focus on game theory, the chances of Congress passing any large infrastructure bill seem remote.

Teaching 101

In one of his many wonderful books, Robert Heinlein posited a theory that if you could somehow travel back in time and scoop up a very bright caveman and transport him into a future where you dropped him into the control room and left him to observe the operation for a few years, that the caveman would never understand what was going on.  As the years passed, the caveman would figure out where the employee cafeteria was located and to be wary about a few of the warning signs, but the caveman was far more likely to concoct some bizarre religious meaning to his surroundings than to grasp even the fundamental principles of nuclear fission.   

Perhaps a better analogy would be Mako Iwamatsu, in the movie, The Sand Pebbles.  No matter how carefully Steve McQueen explained the workings of the ship’s engine room, Po-han still understood it only as “strong stim” and “sleepy stim all dead”.

I offer the above as a warning—I’m about to make some suggestions about improving the quality of teaching at a university.  Like the caveman, I have spent a little time wandering academic halls, trying to figure out the meanings of signs.   I mean that literally, for I remember a carefully drawn diagram in a hall at Enema U that would direct you to the fire exit roughly five feet from the bulletin board.  If you are fleeing a burning building and stop five feet from the safety of an exit that consists of a clear glass door to the outside, in order to read a bulletin board, you are either an occupant of the Administration Building or an education major.  

All told, I have close to four decades of university experience at various colleges and universities.  As a student, a graduate student, an instructor, a professor, and now, once again as a student, I’ve figured out how to find the cafeterias, the closest parking spaces, and the best places in the library to quietly read.  And most important, I have learned a few things about teaching and have some suggestions for the university to implement to improve the quality of teaching.

None of my suggestions has anything to do with any particular professor, (certainly not any of my current professors who have quite graciously allowed me to enroll in their classes).  Many of my ideas come from discussions with other students or from my experiences on other campuses.  

Last week, I mentioned that while you need a degree in education and a teaching certificate to teach an eighteen-year-old senior at a high school, all that is needed to teach that same student a year later at a university is a master’s degree in the subject.  Neither experience nor even basic instruction in how to actually teach is required to teach at most universities.  In my case (which is similar to that of many others), I learned by trial and error, with heavy emphasis on the latter.  

High school education would benefit tremendously by simply requiring a content degree to teach a subject and if you coupled that with schools making the outrageous decision to spend as much on math and science as they do on football, most of our problems with public education would vanish.  And while I think that the College of Education should be burned to the ground while its professors are having a faculty meeting inside, I do believe that new faculty members would benefit from a day or two of instruction.  Call it a “boot camp”.

This is far from an exhaustive discussion, but there are several areas where new professors have noticeable problems getting started.  How do you write a good lecture?  How do you prepare your PowerPoint slides to go with a lecture?  While it’s unlikely that any two professors do it exactly the same way, anyone just starting out could use a little help.

How do you time a lecture?  By this, I mean how does someone starting out know how to fit the material they have to teach within the time limits of a class period?  There is nothing more painful than seeing the panic on a new professor’s face when halfway through a class period they suddenly realize they have run out of prepared material.  And what do you do when the screen won’t come down, or the projector blows a bulb, or the instructor’s computer seems to be broken?

I’m sure there are several ways to handle such situations, but in my case, I used to include optional material in my lecture notes, printed in italics, just in case I needed it.  And I always included a list of possible discussion questions.  And most important, all the electronics in a room are there to help an instructor, not as instructor replacements.  The one time I wrote a lecture that absolutely depended on my being able to show slides was, of course, the day I arrived to find that the projector had been stolen.

If you have never been the lecturer in a large room, there are a few things you need to know and most of those are things you can only find out by spending a little time in the classroom before classes start.  How big do you have to write on the whiteboard so someone in the back row can read it?  How large does the print on your PowerPoint have to be to be legible?  How loud do you have to talk so someone in the back row can hear you?  Classroom thermostats are nearly always locked, so what do you have to do to break the lock so you can change the setting?  Depending on the setting, a classroom large enough to hold a hundred people is either going to be stiflingly warm when it is full or uncomfortably cold when your class of thirty students is scheduled into it.

New faculty never seem to know that the university furnishes neither the markers for a whiteboard nor chalk for the few remaining blackboards.  An instructor not only needs to bring their own, but needs to realize that any color other than blue, black, or red won’t be legible under the fluorescent lights for anyone sitting more than ten feet away.  

All universities have a small department of designated faculty whose only job is to help new professors learn how to teach…And new professors need to avoid these people like the plague, as they were not chosen for that position for their ability to teach, but for their ability to please the administration that selected them.  Every year, the university hands out awards to the faculty for whom the students have voted and declared to be outstanding faculty.  These are the people that new faculty need to hear from, but since these people are far too busy actually teaching, you are unlikely to find them at the Learning Center, the Teaching Academy, The Department of Academic Circle Jerks, or whatever cute name your university uses for the aging cheerleaders who couldn’t teach ducks to swim.

Since the university won’t help you find these people, do what most of your students do: consult Ratemyprofessor.com.  Students are far more likely to give honest evaluations to a third-party anonymous online service than they do with the evaluation forms they are given by the university.  Frankly, students don’t trust those evaluations to be either honest or confidential, so they are overly kind and circumspect in those official evaluations.  (And just between the two of us—yeah, those official evaluations are about as honest as elections in Venezuela.)

If you are a new professor, go online and look up the other faculty in your department, read the evaluations the students wrote.  Then seek out the ones with the best reviews and ask their advice.  Anyone the students like is probably a nice enough person to be happy to help you.  And anyone the students really dislike….  Well, the students are always better judges of character than the administration.  

Teaching isn’t necessarily hard and the administration could do a lot to help the new faculty do it well, but since the administration only pretends to care about the quality of teaching, it won’t and new faculty will have to do it for themselves.

Death of a Historian

I first met Ray Sadler when I was a student in search of a major.  I took his course on military history mostly on a lark, with no real desire to pursue a degree in a field of study that I was certain was both useless and boring.  My ignorance of what history was really like was due to my only previous exposure to history:  its being poorly taught high school history by illiterate football coaches.  

Learning history from someone who not only enjoyed history, but who obviously enjoyed teaching it was electrifying—every class was exciting and I could hardly wait to do the reading so I could learn more of “the story”.   Nor was I alone in this opinion, as an empty seat in the classroom was a rarity.  This was where I learned an important lesson about teaching:  an empty classroom is a more accurate indication of a poor teacher than of poor students.

A well-taught class can make a tremendous, even a life-changing, impression on students—I was far from the only student in that class who decided to major in history.  

Through Dr. Sadler, I also met Charles Harris, his history colleague and writing partner.  Together, these two men were to me the very embodiment of how history professors—at least male professors—should act and how they should respect their students.  I think the best way to describe these two men is to simply say that they were gentlemen.  Though the definition has unfortunately changed over the years, to me, the definition of a gentleman is ‘someone who strives to put others at ease’.  I can give you an example.

In that first history class I took with Ray Sadler, just before the midterm exam, a student asked a simple question.  “Would Dr. Sadler please clarify which side were the Confederates?  The North or the South?”

When this question was asked, I remember staring hard at the student, trying to discover if the hole through his head started in the front or the side.  Dr. Sadler, however, answered, “I’m sorry.  I should have explained that better, the Confederates were from the South.”

When I started teaching, I discovered that whenever I had a problem in a class, I could best solve it by simply asking myself, “What would Ray Sadler do?”  While I doubt that very few would extend the definition of gentleman far enough to include me, remembering the examples of Professors Sadler and Harris did help me frequently while I was teaching.  (And a couple of decades later, when a student asked me the exact same question about the Civil War, I could calmly look at the student and say, “Did any of your parents’ children survive?”)

Years later, even though I had continued my graduate studies of history, I had never even considered teaching history, for I knew that such jobs were impossible to obtain.  Then, one day Ray called me and asked if I was interested in teaching a weekend college course on the history of Mexico.  Truthfully, I wasn’t even remotely interested in ruining my weekends for what I suspected was small pay, but I felt that I owed a deep debt to the man who had first instilled in me a love of history. 

“Sure,” I said.  “When does it start?”

“The day after tomorrow,” he answered.

Teaching my first class with only two days notice was impossible, but because it was Ray Sadler, I spent the next 48 hours practicing my first lecture in the backyard for the benefit of a few birds.  I taught the course, and two more the following semester, and many, many more over the next two decades.  Teaching history turned out to be one of the passions of my life and I never would have known this if Ray Sadler hadn’t called me and offered me a classroom.  I will never be able to repay that debt to the best professor I have ever met in my life.

It might surprise most people to learn that the only qualification to teach a college course is the right sheepskin—there are no preparatory classes on how to teach, nor does the typical administration really care what happens inside the classroom as long as the student pays for his tuition with a check that clears the bank.  It was Dr. Sadler who taught me that the two great reasons for doing your very best in the classroom:  your own pride in doing a job the best you could and perhaps more importantly, that you owed a debt to both to the people who had educated you and to the students who had paid to rent the room, turn on the lights, and pay your salary.

As a student, for five years, I took every available class from Dr. Sadler.  I have a talent for note taking during class, and quickly learned that if I typed up my notes after class, not only were they easier to study, the simple act of transferring the hastily scribbled notes into legible text reinforced my memory of the subject.   As I write this, I can see a whole row of notebooks labeled Cuba, Central America, Military History, Military Intelligence, etc.   Years later, when I had taught some of those same classes in the same rooms where I had been a student, I was astonished to discover that many of the lectures I had written contained long passages identical to what was in those notebooks.

I can’t help but wonder how many other teachers’ approach to history was molded by Ray Sadler and, perhaps, whether any of my own former students, who are now teaching their own courses of history, are even aware that they are passing down the words of Ray Sadler.   Since Ray once told me that he had calculated that over the years, he had taught something close to 7% of the adult population of the state of New Mexico, he has achieved something close to intellectual immortality.

Ray Sadler, the man, has unfortunately passed away.  Ray Sadler, the teacher, lives on in the lives of his students and the students of his students.

The Heart of the Matter

One of the great joys of a library—among the multitudes of great joys every library offers—is the pleasure of selecting a book at random and opening it up to read a chapter.  You would be surprised at how often this leads to finding a hidden treasure.

Similarly, whenever you are searching for a particular book in the library, after you find it in the stacks, turn around and select a random book from the shelf behind you.  There is buried treasure hidden all over a library, and no one charges you to dig randomly.

I will admit to having a certain bias in favor of books.  I’ve always thought the most challenging ‘escape room’ setting would be a well stocked bookstore with clearly marked exits.  Eight hours later, I'd only be halfway to the exit.  Despite my bias towards books, such random research does have serendipitous benefits, such as today’s topic. 

When James Cameron wrote the story that eventually became the film “Titanic”, he did what most good writers do; he wove together tidbits of facts and imagination to create a great story that was made into a great movie.  One of those combinations of real and fantasy was the 56-carat blue diamond, Le Coeur de la Mer (The Heart of the Sea).

Cameron probably used as a basis for his story, the real-life story of Kate Florence Phillips and Henry Samuel Morley.  Nineteen-year-old Kate worked for Morley, and despite a twenty-year age difference, Morley abandoned his wife and daughter to run away with Kate, intending to resettle in San Francisco.  Traveling under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Marshall, they booked a second-class stateroom on the Titanic where Marshall gifted Kate with a large necklace consisting of a blue sapphire surrounded by smaller diamonds, nicknamed “The Love of the Ocean”.  

On the night of April 12-13, 1912, Kate boarded lifeboat 11, wearing only her nightgown and the necklace, and clutching her purse and the keys to her trunk.  Morley, who could not swim, went down with the ship—as did Kate’s trunk.  Neither his body nor the trunk was ever found, but the necklace is currently in the possession of a private collector in Florida.  You may have seen it when Celine Dion wore it at the 1998 Oscars, while she performed the movie’s theme song, My Heart Will Go On.

This is a good story, and the movie changed only a few things.  In Cameron’s version, Hockley, the film’s protagonist bought the magnificent gem as a wedding present for Rose, his fiancée .  As he puts the necklace around her neck for the first time, he explains that the 56-carat diamond had once belonged to the French King, Louis XVI and is incredibly valuable.  For the rest of the film, Hockley chases Rose and her new-found love, Jack, both of whom are unaware that they are in possession of the fabulously valuable jewel.  The movie is not so much about the sinking of the ship, but a quest to recover the expensive jewel.

Cameron once again took real events and slightly modified them.  The gem pictured is not real, it was cubic zirconia, but it was based on an actual jewel.  Louis XVI had actually inherited a magnificent blue diamond, Le Bleu, or the French Blue.  And at the time the movie was made, the fate of the fabulous jewel was still unknown.

What became the French Blue was discovered in India at the same mine that produced the Koh-i-noor diamond that is part of the British Crown Jewels.  Discovered in approximately 1610, it was cut in the fashion popular in India, a style that emphasized the size of the jewel more than luster or symmetry, essentially turning this massive stone into nothing more than a polished river rock.  While most diamonds are prized for their total lack of color, this diamond was notable for its steel blue color.

It was purchased by a French diamond merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier and brought back to Paris.  Originally known as the Tavernier Diamond, it soon caught the eye of the only person rich enough to buy the gem.  Louis XIV bought the gem and had it cut down from an original 115 carats to 69 carats—a process that intensified the unique blue color and made the gem appear more symmetrical.  The beautiful gem remained the property of the French monarchy until the French Revolution.

During the French Revolution, after the King and Queen were put under house arrest, the crown jewels were confiscated and locked up in the French Royal Treasury.  In September 1792, a mob of peasants stormed the building, slashed the throats of the guards and ransacked the treasury for five days.  The crown jewels, include the French Blue, vanished.

For several decades, the exact location of the blue diamond was uncertain, though there are a number of interesting possibilities.  One rumor says that Marie Antoinette had hidden the jewel before she was arrested and had entrusted it to her hairdresser to smuggle back to Austria.  A more likely version says that it was smuggled to England and sold to King George IV, who bought it—and every other shiny object he could find—despite the monarch already being hopelessly in debt.  

In 1812, just a few days after the last possible date to prosecute someone for crimes committed during the French Revolution, a large blue gem was recut by a London jeweler, reducing the size of and rounding the shape of the diamond.  While historians had surmised for years that this might be the French Blue, the recent discovery of working drawings of the stone and how it was to be cut firmly establish that this was the former royal diamond.  Using those drawings, a computer was able to produce an image of what the French Blue probably looked like before it was recut.

It’s most likely that the jewel remained the possession of King George IV until his death in 1830, when it was probably privately sold to pay off some of the immense debts he had amassed during his reign.  Buying the diamond only to sell it—either to pay off debts immediately or after the death of the owner—set a pattern that would be repeated for the next century.

In 1839, the diamond resurfaced as part of the gem collection of William Phillip Hope, whose name has been attached to it ever since.  After Hope died, the stone was bought by and subsequently sold by a series of wealthy people on both sides of the Atlantic until it was finally sold to Pierre Cartier, the famous jeweler.

Cartier had a potential buyer in mind, Evalyn Walsh McLean, of Washington D.C.  Mrs. McLean was…well…today we would call her, “eccentric”.  Cartier, a crafty salesman, loaned her the diamond for the weekend.  The tactic worked:  by the beginning of the next week, the flamboyant Mrs. McLean had purchased the gem and had commissioned Cartier to refashion it as the centerpiece on a necklace containing 45 diamonds.

Until her death in 1947, Mrs. McLean wore the necklace frequently to fashionable Washington and New York affairs… and on at least one occasion, allowed the family dog to wear the diamond.  After her death, her entire collection of jewelry was purchased by the New York jewelry firm, Henry Winston.  In 1958, the gem was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remains to this day, as the museum’s most popular attraction.

Well, that’s about it, except for two last points.  First, when the Smithsonian had the diamond removed from the necklace for cleaning recently, the loose stone was weighed and it was discovered that the diamond was now 45.52 carats.  Second, when the movie Titanic was made, Cameron didn’t know that the French Blue was actually the famous Hope Diamond because the working drawings proving the diamond’s true provenance had not yet been discovered.

$$$$$$$

Perhaps because I have been diligently studying for my economics classes all week, I keep finding myself daydreaming about money.  Not wealth, mind you—I’ll leave that to the politicians in Washington, who are currently arguing about the definition of “fair wealth”.

No—I’ve been thinking about actual physical money:  Greenbacks, sawbucks, moolah, cash, currency, dosh, and dough.  No, I’m not going to give you a history of money (well, not much), but I’ve just been thinking about actual cash, physical, folding money.

I’ll start with a brief correction.  A couple of weeks ago, I predicted that the new government of Afghanistan would likely trigger a wave of runaway inflation by putting the printing presses at the state treasury into hyperdrive.  It turns out that, at least for the moment, this is impossible, since the government of Afghanistan doesn’t possess the necessary machinery to print its own currency:  in the past, it contracted the job out to a company in another country, safely beyond the reach of the Taliban.

I suspect that the Afghani—the currency used in Afghanistan—was printed by the ultra-secretive American Banknote Company, which has a long history of printing currency and postage stamps for many countries.  If I’m correct, I suspect that the new Taliban government will have to find a new way to print their future money, since the American Banknote Company has long since learned the risks of dealing with revolutionary armies.  In fact, one such memorable lesson was taught just a few miles from my home

During the decade-long Mexican Revolution, every army that attempted to overthrow the government tried to finance its operations by printing its own version of the ‘official’ Mexican currency.  It didn’t take long before some “freelance” printers realized that if there were more than a dozen official versions of Mexican money floating around, no one would notice if a few counterfeit versions were added into the mix.  

One such revolutionary leader was Pancho Villa, who operated just a few miles south of my home.  Villa’s first version of currency was pretty sad looking—little more than a rubber stamp on white paper, with each ‘bill’ worth only a few pesos.  It’s kind of hard to imagine how anybody would be foolish enough to accept the bills unless Villa and his army were personally present, urging the recipient to cheerfully accept the banknotes.

Clearly, Villa needed currency with a little more class, and the American Banknote Company cheerfully accepted a contract to print up a more professional looking batch for him.  Well, it was a little more than a batch:  it took up the better part of a railroad boxcar to deliver it to the general.  When the boxcar crossed the border at El Paso into Mexico, a representative of the New York printing company presented the bill to General Villa and demanded payment.

Pancho Villa, the one-time cattle rustler turned Revolutionary leader, promptly agreed, and paid off the company with the freshly-printed bills from inside the boxcar.  Since Villa’s currency was backed up by the full faith and credit, to say nothing of the rifles, of his army, you can be sure the payment was accepted with a smile.

I cannot be sure that the American company actually got the contract to print the currency for Afghanistan since they have a number of rivals, including several European firms, but because the United States was footing the bill for propping up the government, I hope we were smart enough to give the job to an American company.  (Even as I wrote that just now, I realized how hopelessly naive it sounds.)

According to the BBC, the monetary situation in Afghanistan has become a major problem:   currency of any sort is becoming increasingly scarce, shutting down commerce.  Before the Taliban crisis, there were several different forms of currency in wide circulation, with American dollars being the most widely sought after.  The second most popular was the Afghani currency, regardless of which company was actually making them.  These banknotes were widely accepted because the Central Bank of Afghanistan would, upon request, exchange them for American banknotes.

Now, you are probably asking why the Central Bank would want to do that.  An even bigger puzzle is how the bank could afford to do that.  It’s well-known that the only thing that Afghanistan regularly exports to the United States is a substance that is not regulated, is not calculated as part of the GDP, and usually is not a legitimate part of a country’s banking system, so where the hell was Afghanistan acquiring the United States currency to exchange for the somewhat questionable newly-printed Afghanis?

As I am sure you have guessed, the government of Afghanistan simply used currency we obligingly gave them.  According to the BBC, an American military plane transported $249 million in freshly printed money to Kabul every three months.  Why $249 million?  I can’t prove it, but I suspect that any sum above $250 million triggers some statute that requires congressional notice.  $249 million dollars is not exactly folding money, as that much cash takes up far more space than you would imagine.

The United States Treasury stopped printing bills larger than one hundred dollars shortly after World War II, and began recalling them for destruction in 1969.  (Nixon thought such a move would help the ‘War on Drugs’.)  Forced to use only hundred-dollar bills, $249 million would be no small pile of money.

On television crime shows, they frequently use a briefcase that supposedly holds several million dollars in small bills.  In reality, a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills (right) would weigh about twenty pounds and would completely fill an average sized briefcase.  The same amount in fifties would weigh forty pounds, and if you were to use twenties, it would weigh roughly a hundred pounds.  Used bills weigh about 10% more than new ones, so—despite what they show on television—a thief trying to make off with several million in small, unmarked bills is going to need a forklift.

With a little math, you can get the results.  A pallet of bundled bills, stacked six feet high, would hold about $100 million and weigh about a ton.  The United States shipped two and a half pallet loads of such currency to Afghanistan every 90 days to prop up the Central Bank.  At the very least, I hope we got a free toaster for opening the account.

It probably won’t surprise the reader to learn that several hundred million dollars in currency simply vanished from the Central Bank when the Afghan government collapsed.  We know that Ashraf Ghani, the President of Afghanistan fled from his palace with so much cash that not all of it would fit inside his helicopter, forcing the fleeing president to leave stacks of bills on the airport tarmac.

As for the rest of the tons of cash left in Afghanistan, it has simply vanished.  I suspect that the forklift tracks lead straight to Switzerland.