The OP is correct in suggesting that Americans are able to identify bills immediately out of habit. In fact, it is a matter of interest for Americans when recent immigrants express nervousness and caution in handling bills for fear of overpaying by accident.
One reason the U. S. government makes changes so rarely is that there are blocs in the country which are highly suspicious of, and resistant towards, changes in the design of money. Any proposal to alter currency invariably excites rumors that either the government is planning to somehow invalidate the money which is already in circulation and/or that the new design is part of a Satanic conspiracy linked to scriptural passages referring to The Mark of the Beast.
No kidding.
As for opposition to the dollar coin, I am reminded of hearing on the radio some years ago that many Britishers felt sad or offended that the government was making a shift from coins to paper. I could relate, as I had heard plenty of people say the same thing when the government made its disastrous attempt to establish the Susan B. Anthony dollar, otherwise known as “The Carter Quarter”. It really doesn’t matter what one is going to or from; what matters is what one is accustomed to. Money is part of the wallpaper pattern of daily life; there is something comforting in its sameness and regularity, even if one doesn’t examine it closely.
And a lot of people don’t examine money closely; I’ve read a couple of times that before the back of the five dollar bill was redesigned the Treasury Department had, for decades, received calls as a weekly thing from people around the country who wanted to know why there appeared to be a number written on the bushes to the left side of the steps of The Lincoln Memorial. The shadows which resembled a number had always been there, but it was a daily experience for someone, somewhere, to notice it for the first time.
The appearance of money has psychological weight, as it conveys a message about the quality and substance of the money it represents. I’ve heard people speak sadly about how dropped coins used to sound better. And they really did; I remember when I was a kid (the fifties and sixties), a quarter could sound a little like a bell when it hit a table. When I was a boy a quarter “felt” like a lot of money (hey: you could by an 80-page comic book with it). Well into adulthood it still felt like something substantial. The fact that it no longer has this impression for me, I think, has as much to do with the fact that quarters are now sandwich coins as with the effect of inflation.
Similarly, when bills were redesigned a few years ago it was routine for people to complain (quite fairly, I think), that the altered designs made the bills look like pretend money from a board game such as Monopoly.
As for why U. S. paper money became so uniform in appearance to start with, my WAG is that it was done to suggest a sense of stability. This is also one reason why the government has always been so slow to redesign it. In the same way, for a period in the late 19th Century the federal government required that federally licensed banks have generic names–e.g. The First National Bank of Podunk, The Second National Bank of Podunk, etc. precisely because it was felt that bland uniformity would reassure people by making banks seem more steady and reliable.
All of this suggests a question: given that money is redesigned in the U. S. so rarely, why is that the government started coining the commemorative quarters with a different back for each state?
My guess is that the government was actually doing something quite clever. The project started in 1998. It is a little hard to remember now, but at the time the AM radio airwaves were flooded with evangelists insisting it was a sure thing that The Second Coming was going to occur in the year 2000.
If even only a small percentage of the population only sort-of believed these stories, this amounted to millions of people who were basing their plans for the future on the assumption that nothing they did was going to matter much in a couple of years. It is bad policy for a government to encourage that sort of thinking; there are already plenty of people who get into debt as though there is no tomorrow or fail to due productive things such as study for a trade without there being a growing movement of people who are sure there really isn’t going to be a tomorrow.
What, though, could the government do about it? Could it announce that it felt confident that the world as we know it wasn’t about to end? That would hardly very convincing. Worse, it would get more people getting to consider the attitudes the government didn’t want people to adopt.
Instead the government started issuing new coins–and let people know that the new coins were going to continue to come out as a regular thing for another ten years. Every time a person was handed a new coin they were reminded that they were witnessing a program which was going to continue past the year 2000. Every time a person was handed a new coin they were being given the sublimnal message that life as they understood it was going to endure.
Anyway, it’s a theory. don’t
