Wizarding numbers: 24 000

[o_caipora]

No: HPFGUIDX 83457

"Robert Shaw" <Robert at s...> wrote:

> If there's an inconsistency present, then I'd like to pin it
> down and find out just how big it is.

Due the fertility of Rowling's imagination, for which God bless her, 
there's just too much stuff for a small population. Take transport. 
To get around wizards have: portkeys; the Knight Bus; floo powder; 
brooms; MoM cars with special traffic-parting powers; thestrels; and 
the Hogwarts Express. And I may have forgotten a few.

And as she writes she invents more. Just in the last volume we got 
the MoM and the hospital. Somebody's probably already calculated how 
many workers there are in each of those. There are two books left, 
and there's bound to be more things that require more wizards to run 
them.

> However we don't know what contribution is made to wizarding
> society by non-wizards.
 
We know that the WW is subject to time and decay. Besides the 
condition of the Black house, secret passages collapse at Hogwarts, 
and the school needs a custodian. All that fancy wizard stuff must be 
not only built, but maintained. 

Let's take just the Hogwarts Express. It uses station and track, and 
has and engine and always just the right amount of cars. 

Perhaps wizards didn't build the platform: engineers since the 
Pyramids have put passages into their drawings that they didn't 
explain to the stoneworkers. The cheapest use of wizard labor would 
have be to use a spell to alter the blueprints, and then enchant the 
entrance once the workers were gone. Even so, Platform 9 3/4 probably 
needs cleaning and repainting not much less than Platform 9 does. And 
all that track! Maybe most is Muggle track, with the signals charmed 
to keep other trains off when the Express is running. But even that 
implies someone to devise new charms as Muggle systems change, and 
there has to be a few kilometers of track too close to Hogwarts to 
let Muggle track workers approach. 

It's at least a dozen people, assuming they all work several tasks. 
And that's for a train that runs twice a year. 

There a limit to what can be done "by magic". The effort that Fred 
and George expend in launching a new business and trying to create 
new project shows what magic can't do.

It probably can't make the trains run on time, all by itself.

Others have brought up the daily paper, the magazines, the several 
professional Quiddich teams. 

Another data point is Mundungis's trade in stolen cauldrons. Is a 
population of 24,000 sufficient so that the makers and buyers of said 
cauldrons don't trip over one another?  Somehow it doesn't seem so.

> > However, detailed analysis will be akin to taking a plate of
> > bouillabaisse and attempting to reconstruct the creature from 
> > which it was made.
> 
> Difficult but doable.

Perhaps "fruit salad" would have been a clearer example. Depending on 
your recipe, several to half-a-dozen kinds of seafood go into 
bouillabaisse, and no amount of analysis will permit a reconstuction 
of what "the Bouillabaisse" looks like swimming in the sea.

There are detailed stories of magical worlds. In Randall 
Garret's "Lord Darcy" stories such as "Too Many Magicians" magic 
follows consistent rules. In Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" the 
nature of magic is described, and the central plot device, the 
Warlock's Wheel, can be seen to be "valid" magic under the rules 
given. 

Rowling doesn't have that level of consistency. She throws into the 
cauldron whatever looks tasty. 

> Digressions aside, you are seriously underestimating the ability
> of maths and science to extract data from noise.

There has to be data there, though. Even a single vertabra must have 
once been part of a creature that swam, crawled, ran, or flew. 

Rowling's wizards, though, are not part of a real world. They are not 
even part of a world invented with great care given to consistency. 

She's given us some hard numbers, and you've carefully come up with a 
solution and a margin of error from that. But the details she throws 
in with each sucessive volume just don't seem to square with such a 
small population. Even the number of chairs at the High Table in the 
Hogwarts Great Hall produce an absurd student/faculty ratio. 

> Consider a small town, maybe 25,000 people.
> 
> A town that size will have a distinct sense of its own identity,
> even today. Once, before communication got easier, it would
> have had its own culture, divergent from the national mainstream.

Supporting three professional sports teams, a newpaper, a railroad, 
three or four transport systems, a large hospital, and several 
hundred government employees? Can you envision that? 

Certainly wizards have some advantages over Muggles. A charm that 
makes income invisible to the IRS ("Inland Revenue" over there, I 
think) would be a far lesser magic than many Rowling describes, and 
far more useful. 

 - Caipora