[HPforGrownups] wizarding numbers

[manawydan]

No: HPFGUIDX 83561

Catlady (whose posts I always read with great interest) wrote:
>
> In my opinion, we don't need to think how many wizards would have to
> work to make enough money to pay the wages of wizarding bureaucrats,
> book publishers, and Quidditch players, because (in my opinion) a
> great deal of the money in the wizarding world is 'made' by magic. We

Isn't that making something out of nothing though?

There seems to be a strong element running through canon that the money
supply is in the hands of Gringott and the goblins - they employ wizards as
curse breakers to get access to hoards, and coins are valid by virtue of
having a maker's mark on them. So unless there is some obligation on the
goblins to hand over part or all of any newly minted coins to the MoM, the
Ministry's got to have some other way of paying its employees. Maybe they
_do_ require that of the goblins! Maybe that's yet another source of
resentment in goblindom...

> jobs (including the 'job' of customer). Which leads me to wonder how
> many people are needed for a professional Quidditch team --- seven
> starting players and how many reserves? One or more coaches? One or
> more trainers, medi-mages, and masseurs -- or are all those jobs
> replaced by one witch and her magic? One or more broomstick tenders,
> or do the players tend their own? Talent scouts, ticket sellers,
> groundskeepers, ushers, food and souvenir vendors -- how many  stadia
> are there? (COuld there be only one, gov't-owned, stadium, so that no
> two matches could take place at the same time?)

Also, of course, most sporting clubs run more than one team. So would a
quidditch club run a first team, a reserve team, and one or more youth teams
(under 11, under 13, under 16, and so on) to make sure there's a constant
supply of new players coming through. If you factor those in (and possibly
assume that there's an amateur scene as well) together with the various
national sides, you are going to need a quite extensive network of people to
back it up.

> number of children per family. I believe that there have always been
> Muggle-born wizards because the wizarding folk have never, in the
> last 3000 years, had a birth rate up to replacement level, because
> many wizards and witches never bothered with marriage and/or
> child-bearing at all.

The problem is that we have only a partial view of a very specialised area
of the WW at Hogwarts. And even on the outside we only see a few families
(the Blacks and the Weasleys certainly _do_ seem to go in for an equal or
greater-than replacement number of children: the Malfoys don't (and Lucius
is quite contemptuous of Arthur) but then Lucius and Narcissa are quite
young in WW terms and could quite easily have more children later (assuming
Azkaban allows conjugal visits, that is...)

Certainly on the "genetics" theory (which I know is not the same as yours),
a birth rate less than replacement rate would by now see a crisis looming on
the WW horizon.. Because of the long generations in which every muggle born
wizard has been scooped up  and ushered into the WW, the number of muggles
with the wizard gene must be getting smaller: it's being bred out.

Mikael wrote:
>I don't see that, especially if you look at pre-modern times. In a reply to
>Robert Shaw, I pointed out that if the WW enjoyed low mortality and high
>fertility (fast growth) for any sustained period of time, while muggles
>simultaneously suffered high mortality and high fertility (slow growth),
>which has been the case until modern times, then wizards would become more
>numerous than muggles in perhaps as little as 500 years, depending on
>starting populations and growth rates.

What you're saying would imply that the ratio grew until the point last
century when muggle population growth really took off, since then it's
declined.

The era of persecution isn't really _that_ long ago in WW generational
terms, if you assume a 60-year generation then there's just 5 generations
between the concealment and the present day.

Mikael again:
>Interestingly enough, the fraction of muggle-borns would put a cap on
>maximum theoretical attendance. We know that 25 % of the wizarding
>population is muggle-born. But how big a fraction of Hogwarts students is
>muggle-born? Erring on the side of caution, I'd say it's maximally 31%,
>probably less.

I think this statement ought to be the other way round - JKR's comment was
that 25% of the Hogwarts population were muggle born.

If 25% of the _WW_ population was muggle-born, the sociological implications
would be tremendous in terms of acculturation to the muggle world. But it
seems that that is not so. Even someone like Arthur, whose work brings him
into daily contact with the muggle world, is firmly rooted in the WW
culture. If such a large proportion were muggle born, then there would be
virtually no room for wizards to have inaccurate notions about how the
muggle world works, any who still shut themselves off from that
understanding would end up as lonely eccentrics.

Cheers

Ffred

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