USA Africa Dialogue Series - How Tall is $1 Billion or What Does a Billion Dollars Look Like?

Dear Bolaji:

I'd be interested in your reaction to the information below, in view of your "arithmetic" regarding the $700 million propaganda.

Regards,

Okey

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How does a million stack up? - Bill Johnson

http://wbilljohnson.com/journal/math/stackup.htm

A million dollars is a lot of money, but have you ever wondered how high a stack of one million dollar bills would be?

To answer this question we must first determine the thickness of a single dollar bill. We can make this measurement with a dial caliper:

With this measuring tool it is easy to determine that a dollar bill is very close  to 0.004 inches thick. A stack of one million of these would be 0.004 times 1,000,000 or 4,000 inches tall. To convert inches to feet, divide by 12. 4000 divided by 12 is slightly over 333 feet. Wow, that's more than the length of a football field! A football filed is only 100 yards or 300 feet.

A billion is a thousand million. If a stack of a million dollars is 333 feet high, then a stack one thousand times this would be 333,000 feet. To find how high this is in miles simply divide by 5280, the number of feet in a mile. The answer may surprise you. A stack of a billion one dollar bills would reach over 63 miles high!

Note: Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois (b. 1974) is 1,454 feet, 443.0 meters, 110 stories.

It is interesting that our space shuttle flies at an altitude of around two-hundred miles above the earth. We would have to stack 3.2 billion dollars to reach this height. Just for fun I looked up NASA's 06 budget. It  was fourteen billion dollars. Why, that's only enough money to make four trips. :-)

1. The height of a stack of 1,000 one dollar bills measures 4.3 inches. The height of a stack of 1,000,000 one dollar bills measures 4,300 inches or 358 feet – about the height of a 30 to 35 story building. The height of a stack of $100,000,000 (one hundred million) one dollar bills measures 35,851 feet or 6.79 miles. The $700 allegedly found with Ms Desiani-Madueke would be 4,753 miles long!!!
2. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=how+tall+is+one+million+dollars+stacked
   

What does a billion dollars look like?

http://www.quora.com/What-does-a-billion-dollars-look-like

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Quora User, no handlebarsno handlebars

170 upvotes by Quora User, Quora User,

Derek Martin, (more)Loading...

A billion dollars look like this in 100 dollar bills:

By way of comparison, a million dollars in 100 dollar bills looks like this:

  

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Written 16 Apr, 2012.

OR

an actual picture of the most cash I've seen:

This is $207M seized from an illegal pharm trafficker in Mexico City. However this isn't even a quarter of $1B.

Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhe...

  

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Written 17 Apr, 2012.

--

Okey Iheduru, PhD
You can access some of my papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at: http://ssrn.com/author=2131462.

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