The Scale of Things

[jferer]

No: HPFGUIDX 43309

Mark:"I once did some quick number extrapulations. Rowling said there 
are about one thousand students at Hogwarts. (Yes, yes, the books 
don't tally, but I'm not going there for now.) There are seven grades 
so that means there about about 150 students per grade. In today's 
culture, there are about 200 people in the population for every 1 
student in a given year. Now assuming that wizards live twice as 
long as muggles, make that 400 to 1. That leaves a grand total of 
60,000 wizards in England. That is only .3 of one percent or 3 in 
every thousand Britians are wizards.

However you cook the numbers, there aren't very many. However there 
is enough to be orginized."

I had some actual figures to work with, to wit: My kids go to a seven 
year grade school (K-6). There's 466 students, and there 10 such 
schools in a town of 55,000. If each school had the exact same number 
(can't be true) they constitute .08 of the population. If Hogwarts 
had 1,000 students, at that rate there would be 11,800 some-odd 
wizards out there. If there are twice that many because of the longer 
life span, it's somewhere around 20,000. That's not much.

I think it's even worse. I'm not sure we can just double the wizard 
population if the normal life span doubles, because we haven't 
accounted for the fact an older wizard has twice as many years' 
chances to get run over by a bus or something. And when Lily and 
James are killed by Voldemort, he hasn't cut short 50 years of life 
per victim, but potentially 120 years. Someone who knows about 
population models could come up with a better estimate than we can. 
On top of THAT, how do we count the Muggle parents of wizards in that 
wizard world population?


Here's another problem. She has Britain covered by Hogwarts, and the 
entire rest of Europe served by Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. If they 
are the only two wizard schools - and we haven't been told, but where 
were the others at the Triwizard Tournament? - then the population 
density of wizards in continental Europe is even worse than in 
Britain.

JKR doesn't seem to be very math-oriented, but there really isn't any 
way to make her numbers work in wizard society. If there were other 
schools than Hogwarts the problem wouldn't be the same, but she's 
said no, so it's no.


JKR often reminds me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this regard. He was 
always careless of detail in writing his stories, sparking about a 
century of debate that still hasn't stopped. I'm almost glad. If it 
all fit, what in the world would we DO while waiting for Book 5, 
besides beat all the characters to death?