Wizarding and numbers
Apr. 2nd, 2018 04:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethIt persists in irritating me that JKRowling's entire wizarding world is having to get by on no better than a primary school education and a lot of vocational training. This serves them poorly. And combining a childish understanding with an elevated level of power serves everyone poorly.
I realise it's not the most helpful and efficient use of my time, but I'm still currently planning on sending the lot of them to City College. They're used to non-traditional mature students, I'm sure they'd cope.
It's also entirely possible all British wizardry could enrol at once, albeit only if everyone else left. CCN has a total enrollment above ten thousand people, UEA about 17K. Other UK universities get as high as 40K, from one quick google question, and that's not counting the distributed ones like the OU. But wizards need high school first, so CCN is the better model.
How many wizards there are in JKR's Britain is a question that gets you to long arguments with a lot of maths. The math depends on the idea that Hogwarts is the only wizarding school in Britain and all British wizards went there, and the idea wizards live longer. How much longer wizards live is a moving goalpost, partly based on trying to hear if someone said 115 or 150, and is complicated by some wizards apparently just not getting around to dying at all. The mathier argument comes from either taking JKR's word for it how many students there are (about a thousand) or trying to work it out from textual evidence (considerably fewer) or just counting crowd scenes and dinner plates. And if you start poking wikis you get answers from approximations with no stated sources, ranging from 3000 wizards total to muggles outnumbering wizards ten to one.
It's a puzzler.
But it's a puzzle with some range constraints.
So, there are at least 280 wizards, cause someone who counted plates reckons we see them in Hogwarts. If they represent an average cohort for a year you get 280/7= 40 wizards a year, pretty evenly divided between houses. Makes for small group teaching and doubling up houses in lessons which require practical supervision. But if you take JKR's word for it then every year has 1000/7= 142 wizards, meaning 36 per house, ish. If a whole House gets educated together then that's over the recommended maximum of 30 per class, which I thought was a legal limit but apparently it's more of a guideline and more complex than that, especially for practicals, and smaller classes or more supervision can be required. Putting two Houses together would be far, far too many at once.
And then there's age range, but I found far fewer arguments about that and far more shrugs. There's a whole thing where textual evidence is thin and inherently contradictory. Like, if wizards can confidently expect to be 115, how come there's only parents and children in evidence, and those parents are head of their households and families? Like, wouldnt they get a pile up like the Queen and her lot are having, where the elder just keeps going and going, and the young are multiple generations away from power?
Maybe older wizards go and live in their towers and leave the rest alone. Who knows.
But if there's 1000 students and wizards live to be 150 then you get an upper limit of wizards in Britain of (1000/7)*150= about 21.5K wizards.
That's the most impressive possible number. Wizarding Britain could fit in a town. Which is about what you'd expect from hearing they can all go to the same school together anyway.
If it's only 40 kids per year then 40*150= 6000. That's not even a market town, that's small town if it stands on tiptoes.
If life expectancy is more like 115 then you're down to 4600.
And 3000 was mentioned. Where and why I don't know.
But that's the boundaries, 3 to 21.5 thousand wizards in Britain, total.
Wizards aren't one in a million, but it's not a bad approximation of wizarding births compared to general population size in a year, given there were 57 million in the UK at the start of the 90s, 65 million now, and class sizes of 15 being perfectly manageable and within range for Hogwarts numbers.
That being the case it would shape their 'world' pretty thoroughly. They're not a minority in the same scale as disabled people in general (maybe 20%), or autistic people (1% ish), they are far far fewer than that. In a democracy their votes disappear into noise. Campaigns on their behalf are going to be put to the back of the queue while wheelchair users are prioritised, purely because 1.2 million wheelchair users rather outweigh them. In a properly run democracy the world will simply never be arranged with their needs in mind. Even applying for reasonable accommodation will be pushed to the back of the to do list if anyone else has clashing needs.
Which clearly could annoy.
And it would annoy people with considerable power.
Still, do they have the power to stop or control a minimum of 3000 muggles each?
That's a bit of a tall order.
Obviously you wouldn't get all three thousand being all that bothered all at once, but since some of their designated representatives own sniper rifles, one suspects one would not have to.
You also couldn't *help* three thousand people all at once. To help that many a year you'd have to do about 9 a day. Someone to bother you once an hour all working day. Lovely.
Granted the numbers would never be that simple, but on the healing magics alone I imagine they could all be kept busy. Although that would depend how quick and thoroughly they could fix things. I found a number for UK hospital admissions around 42K a day, so if everyone could be Healed right there then 21.5K wizards could even stop and specialise, or heal two or three a day. 3K wizards would be a teensy bit more stretched, but 14 patients a day healed up in minutes would be pretty okay even if you use GURPS assumptions and Healers need a rest in between. Still, that's just hospital, I was thinking of the lines at the GP and there just aren't that many wizards in the world.
But you'd get so many people asking for what they can't get any other way, healing isn't the half of it.
If they want lives to themselves for themselves then secrecy is a pretty reasonable way to go.
It also makes some sense of how they don't get noticed - people are bus noticing the other three to twenty one thousand people each instead.
I mean flying cars are pretty notable, but you'd get a note in Fortean Times and someone calling it a balloon, if it wasn't an everyday provable repeatable on command sort of thing. Zappy lightshows wouldn't get a blink now.
Cryptozoology in the wizarding world is a whole other thing, muggles would be chasing magical beasts and beings all over the place, but it's hard enough finding regular octopi or funny looking frogs, beasts with one forbidden habitat seem hideable.
ANYway
Once I saw the range on those numbers my long standing interest in space colonies kicked in. Because they're not going to another planet but 'pure bloods' certainly want to act as if they are.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3304551.html
The numbers get very fuzzy, far too many variables, but for a long term sustainable population they reckon you want at least 10K and preferably 40K. And the starting assumption is none of those 40K are consanguineous.
Our maximum 21K British wizards who seem to be very cousins better be willing to marry foreigners.
... which might explain the wizard cup and a healthy interest in exchange students...
But muggleborns are undoubtedly their best bet, and really very necessary.
The other thing a space colony needs numbers for is sustaining a tech level. If wizardry insists on strict isolationism then numbers alone can explain their relatively retro tech, even without the inbuilt incentives towards magic. Indeed the magical equivalent of tech level would also be quite low, since maintaining a diversity of knowledge and supporting people as they specialise and experiment takes numbers too. But it's not simple, since all their basic survival needs could be met from muggle sources or possibly by use of magic. So it seems unlikely any significant proportion of wizarding population ever needed to plough a field. If they lean on muggle support services then they've got the numbers to be one lively university, or many research departments. So on tech level I have questions but far too much fuzzyness of variable to get answers. Still, by GURPS rules (Space p179-180), wizarding Britain can only maintain TL4 without outside assistance, age of sail at best. Which... would explain much.
World wide if you take the entirely guesstimated one in a million per year times 150 years you get... 1,140,000, very very roughly. But GURPS reckons the Industrial Revolution, TL5, takes 10 million people to sustain, so you're still stuffed for numbers, if in strict isolation. However it also grants you could manage TL5 at small town size with some input from outside, so there's your occasional wizarding steamtrain.
Of course GURPS seems to thin air its numbers on this one - however could you figure them out? Too many factors - but it's a place to start.
Perhaps Wizarding isn't isolated because its superiority means it has no need of higher tech, it has lower tech simply because it is isolated.
The regular addition of muggles isn't going to fix that with only a primary school education, though it really ought to have pushed some improvements. The information access technologies alone ought to... *sigh*.
Everyone is low tech because Hogwarts and fear, and I'm actively annoyed about it.
But trying to fix it might mean bumping into the ordinary government instead of having their own, and then you end up having to figure about taxes and so forth.
I mean they have a resource no one else can provide, so in conditions of fairness and freedom they ought to be able to get stupendously wealthy, but it really does tempt any number of people to restrict their conditions. Like, make them pay tax in hours worked for the government. Which puts a whole different complexion on how many wizards work for the Ministry. If it's a tithe...
Well, there's a lot of worldbuilding implied in the numbers.
The unfortunately hugely fuzzy numbers that take no account of immigration or local conditions like two recent wars that might have meant it was a very small year or may have cut into the total numbers.
Kind of explains how they could have a war with nobody noticing. Just by the numbers it would look more like a market town riot...
And I shall attempt to go do something more productive.
I don't even read canon in this fandom, I'm just somehow wandered off into fanfic...
*sigh*
I realise it's not the most helpful and efficient use of my time, but I'm still currently planning on sending the lot of them to City College. They're used to non-traditional mature students, I'm sure they'd cope.
It's also entirely possible all British wizardry could enrol at once, albeit only if everyone else left. CCN has a total enrollment above ten thousand people, UEA about 17K. Other UK universities get as high as 40K, from one quick google question, and that's not counting the distributed ones like the OU. But wizards need high school first, so CCN is the better model.
How many wizards there are in JKR's Britain is a question that gets you to long arguments with a lot of maths. The math depends on the idea that Hogwarts is the only wizarding school in Britain and all British wizards went there, and the idea wizards live longer. How much longer wizards live is a moving goalpost, partly based on trying to hear if someone said 115 or 150, and is complicated by some wizards apparently just not getting around to dying at all. The mathier argument comes from either taking JKR's word for it how many students there are (about a thousand) or trying to work it out from textual evidence (considerably fewer) or just counting crowd scenes and dinner plates. And if you start poking wikis you get answers from approximations with no stated sources, ranging from 3000 wizards total to muggles outnumbering wizards ten to one.
It's a puzzler.
But it's a puzzle with some range constraints.
So, there are at least 280 wizards, cause someone who counted plates reckons we see them in Hogwarts. If they represent an average cohort for a year you get 280/7= 40 wizards a year, pretty evenly divided between houses. Makes for small group teaching and doubling up houses in lessons which require practical supervision. But if you take JKR's word for it then every year has 1000/7= 142 wizards, meaning 36 per house, ish. If a whole House gets educated together then that's over the recommended maximum of 30 per class, which I thought was a legal limit but apparently it's more of a guideline and more complex than that, especially for practicals, and smaller classes or more supervision can be required. Putting two Houses together would be far, far too many at once.
And then there's age range, but I found far fewer arguments about that and far more shrugs. There's a whole thing where textual evidence is thin and inherently contradictory. Like, if wizards can confidently expect to be 115, how come there's only parents and children in evidence, and those parents are head of their households and families? Like, wouldnt they get a pile up like the Queen and her lot are having, where the elder just keeps going and going, and the young are multiple generations away from power?
Maybe older wizards go and live in their towers and leave the rest alone. Who knows.
But if there's 1000 students and wizards live to be 150 then you get an upper limit of wizards in Britain of (1000/7)*150= about 21.5K wizards.
That's the most impressive possible number. Wizarding Britain could fit in a town. Which is about what you'd expect from hearing they can all go to the same school together anyway.
If it's only 40 kids per year then 40*150= 6000. That's not even a market town, that's small town if it stands on tiptoes.
If life expectancy is more like 115 then you're down to 4600.
And 3000 was mentioned. Where and why I don't know.
But that's the boundaries, 3 to 21.5 thousand wizards in Britain, total.
Wizards aren't one in a million, but it's not a bad approximation of wizarding births compared to general population size in a year, given there were 57 million in the UK at the start of the 90s, 65 million now, and class sizes of 15 being perfectly manageable and within range for Hogwarts numbers.
That being the case it would shape their 'world' pretty thoroughly. They're not a minority in the same scale as disabled people in general (maybe 20%), or autistic people (1% ish), they are far far fewer than that. In a democracy their votes disappear into noise. Campaigns on their behalf are going to be put to the back of the queue while wheelchair users are prioritised, purely because 1.2 million wheelchair users rather outweigh them. In a properly run democracy the world will simply never be arranged with their needs in mind. Even applying for reasonable accommodation will be pushed to the back of the to do list if anyone else has clashing needs.
Which clearly could annoy.
And it would annoy people with considerable power.
Still, do they have the power to stop or control a minimum of 3000 muggles each?
That's a bit of a tall order.
Obviously you wouldn't get all three thousand being all that bothered all at once, but since some of their designated representatives own sniper rifles, one suspects one would not have to.
You also couldn't *help* three thousand people all at once. To help that many a year you'd have to do about 9 a day. Someone to bother you once an hour all working day. Lovely.
Granted the numbers would never be that simple, but on the healing magics alone I imagine they could all be kept busy. Although that would depend how quick and thoroughly they could fix things. I found a number for UK hospital admissions around 42K a day, so if everyone could be Healed right there then 21.5K wizards could even stop and specialise, or heal two or three a day. 3K wizards would be a teensy bit more stretched, but 14 patients a day healed up in minutes would be pretty okay even if you use GURPS assumptions and Healers need a rest in between. Still, that's just hospital, I was thinking of the lines at the GP and there just aren't that many wizards in the world.
But you'd get so many people asking for what they can't get any other way, healing isn't the half of it.
If they want lives to themselves for themselves then secrecy is a pretty reasonable way to go.
It also makes some sense of how they don't get noticed - people are bus noticing the other three to twenty one thousand people each instead.
I mean flying cars are pretty notable, but you'd get a note in Fortean Times and someone calling it a balloon, if it wasn't an everyday provable repeatable on command sort of thing. Zappy lightshows wouldn't get a blink now.
Cryptozoology in the wizarding world is a whole other thing, muggles would be chasing magical beasts and beings all over the place, but it's hard enough finding regular octopi or funny looking frogs, beasts with one forbidden habitat seem hideable.
ANYway
Once I saw the range on those numbers my long standing interest in space colonies kicked in. Because they're not going to another planet but 'pure bloods' certainly want to act as if they are.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3304551.html
The numbers get very fuzzy, far too many variables, but for a long term sustainable population they reckon you want at least 10K and preferably 40K. And the starting assumption is none of those 40K are consanguineous.
Our maximum 21K British wizards who seem to be very cousins better be willing to marry foreigners.
... which might explain the wizard cup and a healthy interest in exchange students...
But muggleborns are undoubtedly their best bet, and really very necessary.
The other thing a space colony needs numbers for is sustaining a tech level. If wizardry insists on strict isolationism then numbers alone can explain their relatively retro tech, even without the inbuilt incentives towards magic. Indeed the magical equivalent of tech level would also be quite low, since maintaining a diversity of knowledge and supporting people as they specialise and experiment takes numbers too. But it's not simple, since all their basic survival needs could be met from muggle sources or possibly by use of magic. So it seems unlikely any significant proportion of wizarding population ever needed to plough a field. If they lean on muggle support services then they've got the numbers to be one lively university, or many research departments. So on tech level I have questions but far too much fuzzyness of variable to get answers. Still, by GURPS rules (Space p179-180), wizarding Britain can only maintain TL4 without outside assistance, age of sail at best. Which... would explain much.
World wide if you take the entirely guesstimated one in a million per year times 150 years you get... 1,140,000, very very roughly. But GURPS reckons the Industrial Revolution, TL5, takes 10 million people to sustain, so you're still stuffed for numbers, if in strict isolation. However it also grants you could manage TL5 at small town size with some input from outside, so there's your occasional wizarding steamtrain.
Of course GURPS seems to thin air its numbers on this one - however could you figure them out? Too many factors - but it's a place to start.
Perhaps Wizarding isn't isolated because its superiority means it has no need of higher tech, it has lower tech simply because it is isolated.
The regular addition of muggles isn't going to fix that with only a primary school education, though it really ought to have pushed some improvements. The information access technologies alone ought to... *sigh*.
Everyone is low tech because Hogwarts and fear, and I'm actively annoyed about it.
But trying to fix it might mean bumping into the ordinary government instead of having their own, and then you end up having to figure about taxes and so forth.
I mean they have a resource no one else can provide, so in conditions of fairness and freedom they ought to be able to get stupendously wealthy, but it really does tempt any number of people to restrict their conditions. Like, make them pay tax in hours worked for the government. Which puts a whole different complexion on how many wizards work for the Ministry. If it's a tithe...
Well, there's a lot of worldbuilding implied in the numbers.
The unfortunately hugely fuzzy numbers that take no account of immigration or local conditions like two recent wars that might have meant it was a very small year or may have cut into the total numbers.
Kind of explains how they could have a war with nobody noticing. Just by the numbers it would look more like a market town riot...
And I shall attempt to go do something more productive.
I don't even read canon in this fandom, I'm just somehow wandered off into fanfic...
*sigh*
no subject
Date: 2018-04-02 06:46 am (UTC)with as much as a quarter of seats spare
no subject
Date: 2018-04-02 08:10 am (UTC)I think the only way to resolve all her contradictory not-quite-numbers is to throw out the idea that Hogwarts is the only wizarding school in Britain. If there are several schools of which Hogwarts is simply the best or most prestigious (and perhaps the only one to offer full-ride scholarships to any muggle in the nation... whatever nation that is, I'm still not sure how well wizards follow the boundaries of modern nation-states) then we suddenly have a lot more flexibility with our numbers.
The source for "only one wizarding school" comes from three places. First, Hagrid says it. In the context, he might've been engaging in boastful hyperbole. We can discount that. Secondly, in Goblet of Fire Harry acts surprised about other European wizarding schools, and gets an infodump on the big three on Europe. We can just assume that those are, again, the most prestigious ones and certainly the only plot-relevant ones. The third, alas, comes from JKR... but as "how many schools there are?" touches on the question "what's the population of wizarding Britain?" and that involves numbers we can trust that she didn't bother to fully consider the implications and just said whatever sounded right at the time. (There may have been an element of panic there.) And so it can be discounted because this refusal/inability to come up with logical and consistent numbers is a glaring flaw in her otherwise adequate and intriguing worldbuilding.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-02 09:06 am (UTC)My opinion is that canon is such a mess we may as well make up something plausible that suits our purposes and to hell with JKR. She never intended her world building to have this scrutiny and she was never interested in anything more than making it serve her plot and 'look good'. The wizarding world is like a film set - looks good, lots of cool details, atmospheric, makes the right impression - but if you actually try to live in it you find the plumbing doesn't work. (That metaphor got away from me.)
The only way for people with our sort of minds to make it work is to pick and choose the bits we want to keep and invent the rest. Which is great for fanfic but also annoying.
Oh, and I favor the multiple-schools small-Hogwarts-classes model.