Number of teacherspopulation/wizarding economy

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 12931

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., rhodhry at y... wrote:
> I doubt greatly that they do clever scheduling to have one year not
> having classes at any given time - it would be much more advisable
> to hire an extra teacher or two. 

I don't know whether it is 'clever scheduling', but there do seem to 
be times during the day when some students are in class but other 
students have 'free time'. Little things like Harry looking at his 
timetable and seeing that he has no classes on Friday afternoons...

I've made up a vague theory that the few teachers handle so many 
class hours by scheduling many classes to meet only once a week, or 
even only once every two weeks. I made Snape a schedule where he 
teaches Gryffindor/Slytherin Double Potions every morning and 
Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff Double Potions every afternoon (three or four 
hour classes) to first years on Monday, second years on Tuesday, 
third years on Wednesday, fourth years on Thursday, fifth years on 
Fridays, sixth years and seventh years on alternate Saturdays. If he 
grades the homework himself, no teaching assistants, he has no time 
to sleep, let alone live.

> The problem with student-numbers is that no matter how you look
> at  it, or whether you support low or high numbers, it does not 
> completely add up. (snip) 
> With 300 students at Hogwarts, 6000 witches and wizards total
> (all ages) in Great Britain and Ireland (snip)
> The British wizarding society is, IMHO, not self-sufficient enough
> to support at least one newspaper, one weekly, one scientific
> periodical, multiple professional quidditch-teams, a large number
> of industries, etc.

I've been thinking that 1000 students (at Hogwarts as JKR said and I 
believe, or divided among several schools which seems more plausible, 
or being educated by apprenticeships instead of schools) would be a 
wizarding population of 15,000 to 18,000. (Because I think that 
Dumbledore's age of 150 years is a long rather than an average length 
life time, even for wizards.) 

Even raising it to your 20,000, the finances don't work out for all 
those periodicals and Quidditch teams and industries. The industries 
seem to me to be very small operations, but even so... I figured, 
with a LOT of assumptions: that Ollivander charges an average of 7 
Galleons for a wand (that was the price of Harry's), that he owns his 
store and workshop outright, no rent, no real estate taxes, and that 
a small family needs 1000 Galleons a year to live even a thrify 
middle-class way of life, that the profit on wands is one-third (he 
has to pay wand-makers as well materials), that 1000/7 is the number 
of entering first-years getting their first wands (seven years of 
school, seven Galleons for a wand, convenient coincidence). The 
revenue from selling 143 wands would be 1000 Galleons so he would 
have to sell 428 wands a year, or three times as many as wizarding 
folk are born each year. 

All I can figure is that the publications and Quidditch teams and 
industries are really just 'paying hobbies' (in the case of sports 
teams, that's called 'semi-pro'). People work on money-losing 
publications for love of journalism and the glory of seeing their 
names in print... this happens in our Muggle world, too. Science 
fiction fans used to publish vast number of 'zines', printed 
(ditto'd, mimeo'd, xeroxed, occasionally typed with carbon paper or 
written in multiple copies by hand) on paper, before the rising cost 
of paper intersected with the falling cost of Web access. Now there 
are all those Web pages that people spend many hours working on even 
tho' no one pays them. 

So if wizarding jobs are just labors of love, the things that Muggles 
do when we can take the time away from our day jobs, what do 
the wizarding folk do for a living? If they could conjure up all 
their housing and food and clothing and furniture (they *can* conjure 
up their transportation: Apparation), they wouldn't need money to 
live on, but the Weasleys wouldn't be so poor, right? So my guess is 
that every wizarding adult gets a stipend from the MoM (free tuition 
at Hogwarts for the kids, but not a stipend, or having so many 
children wouldn't make the Weasleys poor). If the government is 
handing out money in the form of stipends (the dole), it would be 
irrational for them to be taking that money back in the form of 
taxes... 

Where does MoM get the money to pay all those stipends? I like the 
idea of wizarding money growing on trees, very special and heavily 
guarded trees whose magical fruit is uncounterfeitable, but other 
ways that MoM could get money include regular pay-offs from the 
Muggle governments to stay hidden (with the implication that wizards 
out of hiding would do bad things to Muggles: this is blackmail) or 
using successful divination to make tons of Muggle money on the 
Muggle stock market or Muggle horse races..