[HPforGrownups] What do wizards do?

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 53926

On 18 Mar 2003, imhotep1 wrote:

> Maybe I'm just off my rocker and none of this matters (kind of like the
> whole "the dates don't match up" issue,) but does anyone have any
> ideas.  Are their wizard farmers?  Do most of the Wizarding folk slave
> away in wizarding factories enchanting and transfiguring wizarding
> things for wizarding folk?  Do my numbers seem accurate to you, or does
> half my home state play professional baseball?

If your estimate of less than 30,000 British wizards is correct, I don't
see any problem employing them all.  In fact, I would see the opposite
problem.  30,000 people is considered a mid-sized town these days.  
Mid-sized towns don't as a rule have trouble employing most of their
employable residents.  The amount of work that has to go on to support
day-to-day life is staggering, even if it's not always immediately
apparent.  However, the wizarding world seems to be awash in luxury items,
and I am skeptical that 30,000 people could meet all of their daily needs
while simultaneously devoting so much time and so many resources to
producing luxury items.  It seems to me that there must be a whole lot
more than 30,000 British wizards to accomplish all they seem to do.

Of course, there are additional sources of magical labor besides wizards
and witches (house elves and goblins, for instance), and we do know that
there is a significant import/export trade with foreign wizarding
communities.  Even so, I figure the WW must let the muggle world do a lot
of their labor for them.  There is no reason why the ww needs its own
wheat farmers, for example, when muggles are doing a fine job of growing
wheat on their own.  With the exception of specialty herbs and such, I
would expect most food, and probably raw materials such as wood and stone
as well, are procured from muggle sources.  Of course, that raises the
need for a class of witches and wizards acting as middle men who can do
business with muggles without exposing the existence of magic.

However, if you still want to identify each and every job that fills out
the wizarding economy, it's worth considering the effect of unemployment.  
Even in a healthy economy you can expect a certain amount of "churn," that
is, members of the work force who are currently between jobs.  Between 4%
and 7% seems to be normal for Western industrialized countries.  So that
will reduce the number of wizards you need to find jobs for even further.  
And don't forget about retirement.  We haven't seen many wizards
Dumbledore's age running around, and I suspect that is because most of
them choose not to work any more, at least not full-time.  And there also
seem to be some wizarding families like the Malfoys that are so rich they
don't need to work at all if they don't want to.

I do think there is a large magical production sector that we just haven't
seen yet.  After all, why would boarding school students need to visit a
factory?  I can also think of a few other sectors of the economy that
weren't named in your original post: construction (The Burrow clearly
isn't held up by principles of mechanical engineering, so some wizard must
have built it), animal husbandry (post owls need to come from somewhere,
not to mention bat wings for potions and the leather for those dragon-hide
gloves all students have to have), fashion (Madam Malkin must employ an
awful lot of seamstresses to produce all those robes), security (how do
you keep someone who can disapparate from walking off with your
valuables?), and so on.  Basically, for almost every sector of the muggle
economy there would be a corresponding sector of the magical economy, but
with a lot less brute force manual labor.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"