Or, Can Some American-Presidential Candidate Fix This?

I think I could have crunched the numbers OK, but otherwise I’d have made a wretched economist. Money just doesn’t seem real to me, perhaps because its “energies” appear to escape the laws of thermodynamics. Friends have tried to educate me about the nature of money as an information-bearer. For example, late one night in South Texas, a herpetologist explained economics to me this way: “Money is like a frog’s advertisement-call. It says, ‘Hey, come have sex with me.’ If too many other males are calling, and if there aren’t enough females, then you have to call louder, and you still may not get what you want.” But for me this education-by-simile did not take; I just kept on thinking about frogs and sex.

Money in Zimbabwe is particularly hard to understand these days. Inflation is beyond serious, and stated prices don’t mean a whole lot because different people drop different numbers of zeros in different situations. Therefore, “dis t’ing cost you twenty” can mean $20,000Z or $200,000Z or $2,000,000Z or $20,000,000, or even $200,000,000Z. (Oh, I almost forgot: the government officially dropped three zeros a while back, so if the speaker is talking of the old system—well, he is probably a frog with no hope of progeny anyhow.)

Now the official rate of exchange is $250Z/$1US. (For now let’s forget the old money.) But if you swap your Dead Presidents for that, you might as well hop away from the pond. I changed some money last Tuesday, receiving $200,000Z/$1US. Then, Friday, a gringa fresh from the States got $300,000Z/$1US. Neither she nor I nor the exchanger could say whether she got a better deal or whether it was just inflation. Anyhow, the biggest bill in circulation is $200,000Z, and that denomination is still rare. So if you go to change $100US, you’ll be needing a serious tote-sack to carry your $$Z. (Of course if the CID catches you operating in this “parallel market,” then your money worries are over, because you will become a non-paying guest of the State.)

Anyhow, with zeros dropping like flies, it does not pay to have a savings account; rather, you should spend your cash as rapidly as possible. But what you going to buy? On Friday I tried to purchase 20 AA batteries to run some GPS receivers for a field exercise. I eventually got 16, but I had to find a merchant who (a) had batteries and (b) was willing to violate all sorts of Zimbabwean laws against battery-hoarding. (If I’m not careful, I’m going to be back on the Group W Bench….)

Oh, sixteen AA batteries weight substantially less than the money I paid for them, so I returned to campus with a lighter spring in my step. And it's almost spring here; the birds are already singing. I'm sorry for you folks headed into the dismal seasons!