"Assuming, for simplicity’s sake, that each bill weighs a gram and we average the denominations out to all twenties."
Doesn't this assumption negate the point about the weight of the currency? Inflation means that larger notes are now more common - to assume Dillinger had the same portion of twenties as the Lufthansa heist is silly.
In the US this has been less the case, but to take Australia for example I remember my grandmother withdrawing cash in $2 and $5 notes. Now (25 years on) the ATMs only dispense $20s and $50s, and the $2 bill hasn't existed since 1988.
No kidding. When I was a kid in the 80s, ATMs only seemed to dispense 20s. Now a large percentage of them also dispense 10s.
A decade or so ago, I was receiving my paycheck via a Maestro card, which at that time could be used as an ATM card in the US, but not at a POS terminal. This meant that even for larger payments, I had to withdraw a large amount or go to several different ATMs, leading to an embarrassing and stressful situation when I tried to withdraw $1000 from an ATM, which was fine as far as the software was concerned, but jammed the dispensing mechanism. These days I'm not sure any ATM will let you withdraw more than a few hundred.
On the other hand, I suppose that most of what people carry cash for is food, and food prices haven't risen in the same fashion that housing and fuel prices have, so the amounts of cash people carry hasn't had to rise that much.
In the USA high-denomination bills haven't necessarily been taken out of circulation, but the Mint hasn't printed new bills larger than $100 since the 1940s. Larger bills were really only used for large business and interbank transactions, and for that purpose they've been obsolete for ages. Certainly in the digital age, but before then even paper checks offered greater convenience and security.
There might be some compression toward the center, but realistically most people only use cash for smaller transactions. $20 is a convenient denomination to get out of ATMs, and of course smaller bills come into play as cashiers make change for your payments. But I seem to remember hearing somewhere that economists now estimate that a majority of the US $50 and $100 bills are either circulating outside the country or circulating within the black and gray markets.
My experience in trying to use $1 coins has convinced me that the US probably won't change soon. None of the cash drawers have a space for them. I witnessed more than a little consternation on the part of tellers who couldn't figure out what to do with the money I had just given them. More than that, it means that $1 coins aren't necessarily being given back out as change; easier for the store to just send it back to the bank.
Doesn't this assumption negate the point about the weight of the currency? Inflation means that larger notes are now more common - to assume Dillinger had the same portion of twenties as the Lufthansa heist is silly.
In the US this has been less the case, but to take Australia for example I remember my grandmother withdrawing cash in $2 and $5 notes. Now (25 years on) the ATMs only dispense $20s and $50s, and the $2 bill hasn't existed since 1988.