Just a question on the workings of magical society.

Once again, canon has left gigantic holes that remain unexplained. Today I was researching Marx and his theories, and looking at the pyramids of class, it struck me that Harry Potter has a really terribly class structure.

I don't mean like unfair or prejudiced - which it is - but I mean economically and politically. Judging by what we've seen of magical children at hogwarts, there aren't that many wizards around. If you have maybe 50 kids a year, then there are only (say one child per family) 50 families with children, and say 350 with kids older or younger. And your various adults who don't have kids etc, It just seems like there aren't enough wizards to sustain a society. Using the 5 people per family model (which seems to be average between smaller pureblood and larger mixed blood) and you've only got around 2500 magical people total, including all sundry adults and orphans and whatever. Thats just not enough to carry on a whole society.

And even if thats just Rowling forgetting to put everything into perspective, there doesn't seem to be an actual working class in the society. The only jobs anyone has are either government given, professional sportsman or working the register in Diagon. According to Marx at least, these guys should have a giant oppressed underclass. But if magic takes care of a lot of that, where does the wealth on this society come from? I get that the old money 'donates' a lot, but how does the Ministry pay it's employees when apparently 80% of the adults work there, and the other 20% are fucking retailers. It really doesn't make sense.

And politically, how the hell does a society with only 3000 max people have a representative parliament, the Wizengamot, with over 50 members. they each represent about 60 goddamn people. And even if the group doesn't repesent anyone, and they're all just familial lords, how the hell do you have that many 'elite' families. That accounts for more than half of the population, and thats just those families with enough money to get into the body. What about all those low level ministry families who can't pay the bribes with their non-existent money, as well as the muggleborns, who are apparently in enough numbers to rouse what seems to be at least 5% of the population to join a vigilante group called the fucking Death Eaters to stop it.

It just...hurts my brain. Doesn't make any sense. How the fuck does all of this work? Also, how do you make it work with fanfiction? What can you add to this dumb society to make it viable?

Also, just another thought, how the fuck does an apparently tiny society have enough people just fucking around enough to make a full quidditch league. Including 20 people per team, and lets say 10 teams, thats one fifteenth of the whole magical Britain who are professional sportsmen. What?

 

Don't try to logic Harry Potter.

Edit so I don't look like a douche: They just got out of a war, and if Dumbledore is any indication they live fucking long. While not that drastic of a change, the amount of people would increase quite a bit if we considered everyone reaching their 100 years.

Besides, JK focused more on the good vs evil struggle than in showing wizarding society in the books. As long as you don't come up with something incredible stupid, you can create pretty much any excuse in you fic and move on. Or you can ignore it and go work on the plot.

 

This has been hashed out in various forms with various results far too often to count, but ultimately there are three options.

Option 1: Magic (of the hocus pocus variety)

Option 2: Magic (of the who-gives-a-shit variety)

Option 3: You're wrong (of the who-gives-a-shit variety)


Also, this was all I could think about while I was reading your post:



Edit: Being a douche is awesome.

 

The first HP book was mainly targeted for children. No research was done for it. It got much more attention than expected. I guess Rowling had some plans up till third or fourth book, after that she just desperately tried to tie up the series. That is probably why it wen't downhill from fourth-fifth book.

 

I just find the entire idea of "rich" people, or the need for wealth, or an economy to be pretty much pointless in the HP series. Yes, apparently everyone slept through hogwarts's defense classes and no one can cast a decent shielding charm, according to the twins, but what is stopping these people from learning (other than their own laziness)?

More importantly, what's stopping any wizard from living in sprawling palatial estates?

To me, at least, if one really thinks about what HP magic can do for you, lots of wealth and house elves should garner quiet whispers of "Oh, look, yet another nobody who didn't get enough OWLs or NEWTs. Ha ha!"

Wealth is something you need if you've got to pay someone else to do what you can't. By all rights, any Hogwarts graduate worth his or her salt should scoff at the very idea of wealth and deride it as the stuff of muggles, squibs, and Hogwarts's drop-outs. After all, a real witch or wizard simply conjures, transfigures or charms what they need or want, or if they don't know how, yet, they goddamned well go learn, or be content with what they have and what they can do.

That's just my opinion on the matter.

 

What Rin said. I never really thought about it that way, but it makes sense. Also, even if we argue that transfiguration/charms work is not permanent what would stop someone from doing that every so often? Minerva(can't be bothered to spell her last name in the dark, it's 6am for fuck sake) turned a pig into a desk, after changing from a cat to a human, so what's stoping wizards from just transfigurating the shit out of everything?

Edit: I just realized that I'm still awake at 6am, rationalizing Harry Potter. I'm off to bed.

 

1) There are three billion threads beating this topic to death floating through the dungeons of DLP. The "search" function is there for a reason.

2) That said, my impression while reading the first book for the first time was that the wizarding world was rather big for a hidden society. You have all those celebrating magical people in the first chapter, you have a street full of shops, a magical bank, a magical train station with its own "express"- and you have a really huge school in a medieval castle.... I was rather disturbed when I ran across the calculations using known Hogwarts class numbers and coming up with upper limits of 20.000 people in the whole UK.

 

Another Canon Plothole?

 

Hmm. Seems it's not so much a problem as much as simply that magical society is not like Muggle society.

With respect to population, I think ~3000 people is a sufficient population to survive fine. IRL, the Toba catastrophe states that the entirety of humanity may have been down to 1000 breeding pairs ~50,000 years ago. We seemed to survive okay.

With respect to population, there's contradictory ways to come up with figures for the size of the society.

Quidditch world cup implies a much larger society than 3000.

Also, you have this calculation:

40 magical people born per year (from Hogwarts figures).

Average life expectancy (this is largely guesswork) = 120 years.

40*120 = 4800.

So that figure would give you a larger society, about the size of a village/small town with a mayor etc.

So it seems silly to take just one way of coming up with a population figure and going from there.

 

Taure, the Quidditch World Cup probably attracted a large number of people from around the world, so it may not reflect on GB's population.

Personally, I originally was planning a world-wide wizarding population of ~100k for my fic, but I'm contemplating bumping it up to somewhere between 200k-500k for the very reason said in this thread. I've seen fics (e.g. BC;GE) that have postulated a number well over a million, however, so YMMV. I'd say to let go of the logic and go with what works best for the plot.

 

/me remembers fics with magical armies which number over 10,000 people.
Me laughs.

 

I really, really, really, really hate to say it, but mknote has the right of it. In the end the plot takes precedence over the things we know JKR put no thought into. It's not like changing the main character's name or making wands optional; it's just making a few small adjustments to some arbitrary numbers that would make whatever plot you've got going work better.

 

To the OP: One reason you are encountering this problem is because you are relying on Marx...Try going for a political theorist who isn't an idiot.

 

You could come to the same conclusions without Marx, for example. That said, I agree - even if the population was cut in half during Voldemort's first war, 10,000 seems to be the stable population (or 5,000 at the moment). Which means that their government can't possibly have more than a few hundred people working, as otherwise it becomes Greece.

 

What a wizard wants and what a wizards needs are two different things. I need a house, so I magic one. I need some anti-muggle wards for it, some other things. A connection to the floo network so I can stay in contact with my relatives and friends. A broom to get around or go flying at night. I heard a pet neazle(sp?) would be nice.

Oh shit, what about that nice man who warned me about the nest of Acromantulas hidden not too far from here! I need some kind of protection from them!(Obvious scam artist.)

What about the food I can't conjure for me and my family? I also needs clothes, though I can magic my own, that just wouldn't do since I need one from Madame Malkins for the X-mas party next week. Can't be seen in some home-conjured rag...

Etc. Etc. Etc.

At one point there has to be something for them to trade with. Either it be skills or monetary. Maybe the gold the goblins stored is like our own printed money. Here's a piece of paper, and here's a green one with the letter 10 on it. One is worth more than the other because special things have been done to it. (This is plot driven obviously and my imagination) but maybe there are enchantments done to the coins by the goblins that prevent fake money. Maybe in the past that was a problem and this was the compromise reached when some smart Wizard had a grasp of economics.

tl:dr. So long as people have the capacity to want beyond their needs something they themselves cannot produce, there will be some form of trade. Since Canon shows coins are in circulation, that is the method used. Everything beyond that can be explained away via the author.

So do what I did and apply your own logic and make it make sense, just don't use your own mechanics when getting into a canon(BOOM!) fight.

 

If the world were a perfect place, you could apply that to humans in general. Any of us is capable of learning how to build furniture or grow our own crops or paint our own paintings--but instead we have jobs to pay for these things. The richest person in the world could spend all their time learning and producing their own shit, but why would they when they can pay someone else to do it for them? It's a status thing, and I think that rich people everywhere, be they real or fictional, probably feel they have better ways to spend their time if they can get someone else to do the menial stuff.

 

The thing about magic is that you can theoretically do all of this stuff easily and quickly. As a muggle, even if you know how to do something it still takes forever to build a desk or sew a shirt.

 

Magic doesn't trump the many myriad advantages of division of labour, especially since canon spells out time and time again that different people are better at different types of magic.

 

Considering that the stadium build for the Quidditch cup had sixty thousand seats, the population of wizarding Britain should be at least that. There would be no economical incentive to build a stadium that big if they had no further use for it.

A population that large would mean that Hogwarts is far too small, unless most wizarding families choose not to send their children there. There is no canon evidence of it, but it could be that most young wizards and witches are simply apprenticed to learn some magical craft, and only the rich, those with a family tradition of sending their children there, and those who cannot find a suitable master (muggleborns) enter Hogwarts.