[HPforGrownups] Digest Number 2615

[manawydan]

No: HPFGUIDX 53980


Jeremy wrote:
>First we need a rough estimate of the wizard population.  I start with
>two liberal assumptions: JKR is right about there being 1000 students at
>Hogwarts, and that the average wizard lives to about 200 years old.
>This leads to the following equation:
>1000 students / 7 years = 143 students per year
>143 students per year * 200 years = 28,600 wizards

The recent UK census figures are that young people in the Hogwarts age
groups amount to round about 9% of the population. If there are 1000
students at Hogwarts, then this would imply that there were around 11,000
wizards in the British Isles. That's far too few to sustain the kind of
infrastructure that canon describes. Assuming that wizards live twice as
long as Muggles, that would give round about 22,000, not too far short of
your estimate. But once again, still far too few for the WW infrastructure.

>We know there are at least 91 (13 teams * 7 players) people employed to
>play professional quidditch, and probably a support staff (coaches,
>reserve players, broom boys, ... )

>We can assume that a bunch of people work in publishing, as there are
>quite a few books around.

>things start to get ridiculous (and those 91 quidditch players seem a
>bit excessive, that's the equivalent of there being 1,632,337
>professional soccer (sorry, football) players in Britain + Ireland, or
>7,692,307 professional baseball players in the USA (that's about half
>the population of California)

I live in a city of around 250,000 people. It has a radio station, but the
catchment area is far wider, perhaps a million people. It has one evening
paper (no morning one) with about the same catchment. And it has two
professional sporting teams (one rugby, one soccer).

The WW in (what I think of as the British Isles, as it's obviously not a
"kingdom") has a daily paper with morning and evening editions, plus a radio
station, plus more than one periodical. It also as you rightly say has 13
professional quidditch teams. So the numbers have to be higher.

Now us Welsh are probably as keen on rugby as the WW are on quidditch - at
least, when we've got something to be keen about :-( but the key issue at
the moment is that in a country of 3 million, we can only afford 4
professional teams. One rugby team is two and a half times a quidditch team,
which would suggest that the supporter base for the quidditch league
described in QTTA would be around 3 million or higher.

Frankly I can't see the WW population in the Isles being lower than a
million

Cheers

Ffred


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