Adam Greenwood has a pretty insightful look at one of the commonly confused aspects of arguing about gay marriage over at Junior Ganymede.
A lot of time gets wasted in arguments that are really about what the proper unit of analysis is, without any of the participants quite realizing that is what their argument is about.
Let’s take gay marriage, for example. Defenders of the traditional definition of marriage believe that marriage is fundamentally tied to procreation. Proponents of gay marriage pooh-pooh the suggestion. The defenders, they point out, do not try to prevent old or infertile couples from getting married, nor do they try to prevent couples who have decided not to have children from getting married.
Read the rest for his resolution of this problem, which is really helpful in bringing some clarity to the debate.
There was an initial wave of angry condemnation when The Triple Package was first released, and my problem with that reactionary wave was just that: It was reactionary. It’s been over a month since those first-pass criticisms were unleashed, and over at Slate Daria Roithmayr has had time to formulate a more nuanced and sophisticated response. Or, as turns out to be the case, not. Instead, her response shows the twin perils of (A) putting politics ahead of reality and (B) espousing historical theories without consulting Wikipedia first[ref]I’m not saying Wikipedia is the final word on research, but if you don’t at least start there…[/ref].
According to Roithmayr, the real reason that different cultural groups perform differently is that they start out with unequal resources. Otherwise: we are all exactly the same. The problem is that Roithmayr pretends it’s a conclusion of her research when quite obviously it is pure political dogma. She explains the success of each of the seven cultural groups identified by Chua in their turn. I’m not a historian, so I’m not qualified to analyze all of them, but in the case of her hypothesis about what makes Mormons successful, her explanation is so bad that you don’t have to be. Even the most superficial familiarity with our history[ref]Again: Wikipedia[/ref] shows that she has no idea what she’s writing about. Consider:
It’s not just that Mormons have developed a “pioneer spirit” or that they believe that they can receive divine revelations, as Triple Package would have us believe. It’s more that the first Mormons started with enough money to buy a great deal of land in Missouri and Illinois. They then migrated to Utah, where Brigham Young and his followers essentially stole land from the Shoshone and Ute tribes, refusing to pay what the tribes demanded, and petitioning for the government to remove them. Beyond thousands of acres of free land, early political control over Utah was helpful.
So here’s the true story of Mormonism: a bunch of really wealthy families just decided to buy a bunch of land in New York, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and so forth. Why did they keep moving around and buying new land? Oh, you know, just because. They were fickle like that. Then they thought it would be fun to move to Utah because, you know, the land by the Great Salt Lake is legendary for being so fertile. That’s what everyone says when they drive through Utah, right?
Look how green everything is!
In case you can’t detect all the sarcasm, the reality is that the Mormons were poor and marginalized from the start and that they moved from one state to the other at the point of a gun, suffering murders, rapes, and theft along the way. When they managed to build the city of Nauvoo up to one of the largest American cities at the time, well, that was about the time Joseph Smith was murdered and they were surrounded by thousands of armed men with, you know, cannons and then forced out of their homes without compensation in the middle of winter.[ref]They were able to walk across the Mississippi on their way out.[/ref] The land they stole in Utah was only marginally fit for agriculture and the reason they were there in the first place was simply to get away from constant oppression, but that ended up not working so well when the United States sent the largest federal expeditionary force of its history (to that point) to subjugate those wacky religious nuts, resulting in the low-grade Utah War of 1857[ref]Not to be confused with the Mormon War of 1838 in Missouri or the Mormon War of 1844-1848 in Illinois. In case it isn’t clear: Mormons lost those wars. Or, as Roithmayr puts, it, we “migrated”.[/ref]
Since Roithmayr says “For many groups, like Cubans and Mormons, the early wave was a select group endowed with some significant material or nonmaterial resources—wealth, education, or maybe a government resettlement package,” and since Mormons were by and large quite poor[ref]Definitely after all the pillaging and running for their lives if not before.[/ref] the only reasonable conclusion is that she can’t tell the difference between a resettlement package and an armed invasion.
The Haun’s Mill Massacre where a mob of over 200 killed about 20 Mormon men and boys and were never prosecuted. Or, as Roithmayr describes it, the “Haun’s Mill Polite Conversation.”
She mentions Mormons one more time, writing:
The most recent (newly converted) Mormons hail from Africa and Latin America, and many of them have migrated to the U.S. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has also begun outreach to U.S.-born blacks (African-Americans have only been allowed in the Mormon church priesthood since 1978). Black Mormon trajectories look nothing like the white Mormons at the center of The Triple Package’s argument.
Keen observers might point out the obvious fact that “recent” converts are probably not the best indication of the long-run effects of a culture.
Again: I’m still skeptical of Chua’s points. I haven’t read the book and I don’t subscribe to the thesis. I’m also not nearly as familiar with the history of the other cultures described. I do know that in general there’s a serious selection problem when you’re comparing immigrants (often those with the wealth and education to be mobile) with their home population (sometimes slanted towards those unable to get away). I think Roithmayr could probably have made a serious, convincing counter-argument if she’d been willing to put history ahead of ideological wish-fulfillment. As it stands, she’s making the case against Triple Package look worse, and she’s not doing much for the either the credibility of either Slate or the discipline of critical race theory.
The cover story of the 2014 Jan/Feb issue of Christianity Today traces the work of political scientist Robert Woodberry and his earth-shattering article “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.” While a graduate student, Woodberry took interest in a surprising link between democracy and Protestantism. While various case studies seemed to support the link, it wasn’t until Woodberry “created a statistical model that could test the connection between missionary work and the health of nations. He and a few research assistants spent two years coding data and refining their methods. They hoped to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, worldwide.” The results were shocking. “It was like an atomic bomb,” said Woodberry. “The impact of missions on global democracy was huge. I kept adding variables to the model—factors that people had been studying and writing about for the past 40 years—and they all got wiped out. It was amazing. I knew, then, I was on to something really important.” Woodberry’s discovery revealed a surprising truth: “Missionaries weren’t just part of the picture. They were central to it.” But not every kind of missionary: “The positive effect of missionaries on democracy applies only to “conversionary Protestants.” Protestant clergy financed by the state, as well as Catholic missionaries prior to the 1960s, had no comparable effect in the areas where they worked. Independence from state control made a big difference.” It turns out that “Protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism.” And “so far, over a dozen studies have confirmed Woodberry’s findings. The growing body of research is beginning to change the way scholars, aid workers, and economists think about democracy and development.”
Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has an excellent article in The New York Times on single motherhood and the outcomes of children. Hymowitz is no amateur to the subject and she cites an impressive amount of research. For me, one of her most interesting links was a study that “found a connection between the size of a welfare state and rates of both nonmarital births and divorce. Even if you believe that enlarging the infrastructure of support for single-parent families shows compassion for today’s children, it’s not at all obvious that it shows much concern for tomorrow’s.”
The 2013 study looked at OECD member countries and the effect expansive welfare states had on family outcomes. The findings indicate that the welfare state increases the amount of marriages. However, it also increases the divorce rate and the amount of out-of-wedlock births.[ref]The quality of these welfare-sponsored marriages may be lacking: “First, a more pronounced welfare state may facilitate divorce by providing or subsidizing goods and services to divorced spouses that would be otherwise only available within marriage (e.g., risk sharing). Put differently, in the case of divorce, the indirect e ffect may dominate the direct effect. Second, marginal marriages–those which would have not been formed without the marriage-promoting component of the welfare state–may have a lower match quality, which increases marital instability. Third, the welfare state may alter assortative mating patterns such that less stable marriages are formed…In principle, it is possible that the increased incidence of divorce drives some of the positive e ffect on the marriage rate (i.e., divorces increase the supply of potential partners in the marriage market)” (pg. 12, fnt. 20).[/ref] “Hence, while the welfare state supports the formation of families, it crowds-out the traditional organization of the family by increasing the divorce rate and the number of children born out of wedlock” (pg. 3). The welfare state’s relation with out-of-wedlock births “is consistent with the view that the welfare state creates incentives by providing higher support for single mothers (direct e ffect, as for instance in the case of AFDC), and with the idea that the welfare state acts as a substitute for a stable union (indirect e ffect)” (pg. 13).
I’ve mentioned debates over evolution before, largely based on one of Nathaniel’s T&S posts.[ref]For an interesting analysis of Mormon acceptance of evolution, see Benjamin Knoll’s post at By Common Consent.[/ref] One of Nathaniel’s criticisms of typical polls (specifically the one by Pew Research) is the questions’ wording. Sociologist Jonathan Hill has recognized this as well and introduces in a recent piece in Christianity Today a new nationally representative survey called The National Study of Religion and Human Origins (NSRHO). The new poll asked about the following three propositions:
Humans did not evolve from other species.
God was involved in the creation of humans.
Humans were created within the last 10,000 years.
Hill explains that only “14 percent affirmed each of these beliefs, and only 10 percent were certain of their beliefs. Furthermore, only 8 percent claimed it was important to them to have the right beliefs about human origins…Nine percent believed humans evolved and that God played no part in the process, six percent held these beliefs with certainty, and less than four percent said their beliefs were important to them personally.”
“If only eight percent of respondents,” he continues, “are classified as convinced creationists whose beliefs are dear to them, and if only four percent are classified as atheistic evolutionists whose beliefs are dear to them, then perhaps Americans are not as deeply divided over human origins as polls have indicated. In fact, most Americans fall somewhere in the middle, holding their beliefs with varying levels of certainty.”
Yesterday I decided to poke a hornet’s nest again and write about gender roles at Times And Seasons once more. Some folks are emailing me to tell me how much they like it (which doesn’t happen very often). Other folks are describing it as “the most excruciating pseudo-intellectual, and self-contradicting drivel I’ve read in recent years.” [ref]This is my favorite thing that anyone has ever said about anything I’ve ever written. I’m so pleased.[/ref] ByCommonConsent provided their own insightful commentary, which you can see below:
Not gonna lie: I laughed. Then I wished I had some rolls.
For what it’s worth, one of the main reasons I write about this issue is because lots of other folks (some of whom could certainly do better than me) won’t touch it. I respect that. It’s sort of like running for political office: you have to question them motives of anyone who voluntarily does it, but you also have to wish that more normal human beings would. I think these hot-button issues are really important, and I hope that I can make a case for a basically socially conservative position that will enhance the discussion.
With that goal in mind, I’m planning on one more post on this topic. This one took 3 from-scratch attempts, though, were most of my blog posts are done in one.[ref]With revisions, mind you![/ref] So it will probably take another 2-4 weeks before I come out with the next one.
Not that kind of rivalry, but the kind spoken of in economics. GMU economist Bryan Caplan has a fascinating blog post in which he examines how rivalrous a married couple’s consumption bundle typically is with some aid from equivalence scales. Caplan takes an imaginary couple with the high earner making $60,000 and the low earner making $40,000 annually. Using four distinct empirical strategies,[ref](1) “Expert Statistical” measures for statistical purposes only (i.e. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OECD), (2) “Expert Program” focuses on defining social benefits (i.e. Swiss “base amount,” U.S. poverty line), (3) “Consumption” measures consumer spending constrained by disposable income,(4) “Subjective” is associated with particular income levels for families of given characteristics and their self-evaluation.[/ref] he finds that “the low-earning spouse makes out like a bandit. The surprise:The high-earning spouse gains as well – for all four ways to estimate real-world rivalry…[I]f one partner outearns the other by 50%, share-and-share-alike marriage raises the high-earner’s effective consumption by about 30%, and the low-earner’s effective consumption by about 100%. To quote Keanu, “Woh.””[ref]Caplan asks, “Is there any reason to prefer one method to the others? Yes. People have ample first-hand experience with household management, so the subjective approach is probably better than deferring to government statisticians’ opinions. And looking at actual consumption behavior is probably better than asking people what they think.”[/ref]
He concludes,
These calculations deliberately ignore all the evidence that marriage makes family income go up via thelarge male marriage premium minus the small female marriage penalty. So the true effect of marriage on economic well-being is probably even more massive than mere arithmetic suggests. Why then are economists – not to mention poverty activists – so apathetic?
Wharton’s Adam Grant has an excellent piece at The Huffington Post reviewing research that seeks to uncover what makes a job meaningful to employees. “After more than 40 years of research, we know that people struggle to find meaning when they lack autonomy, variety, challenge, performance feedback, and the chance to work on a whole product or service from start to finish,” writes Grant. “As important as these factors are, though, there’s another that matters more…A comprehensive analysis of data from more than 11,000 employees across industries: the single strongest predictor of meaningfulness was the belief that the job had a positive impact on others.”
A lot of interesting research in this one. Managers take note.
One constant refrain from the pro-choice side of the abortion issue is that there will be just as many abortions if they are illegal, but that they will be much more dangerous. Both arguments are objectively false. It’s old news that the first part of that argument is false. The famous chapter in Freakonomics that claimed abortion lowered crime rates was based on a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics called The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime (pdf). One of the subsidiary findings of the study, discussed in footnote 8, talks about the relatively small decline in births at the same time as the number of abortions went up dramatically after legalization:
Note, however, that the decline in births is far less than the number of abortions, suggesting that the number of conceptions increased substantially—an example of insurance leading to moral hazard. The insurance that abortion provides against unwanted pregnancy induces more sexual conduct or diminished protections against pregnancy in a way that substantially increases the number of pregnancies.
In other words: when abortion was legalized you didn’t see a shift of the same number of abortions from illegal to legal. You simply saw many more abortions. The second part of the argument is also deeply flawed: abortions got safe long, long before they were legalized, and it had nothing to do with the law. (Details here.) It was simply a reflection of advancing medical technology. Even prior to Roe, illegal abortions were performed by doctors, and in the arguments leading up to Roe the safety of illegal abortions was considered an argument for legalizing them. The whole “back-alley abortion” thing was invented after-the-fact as a scare tactic. So the evidence suggests criminalizing abortion would lead to a lower rate of abortions without making the illegal abortions that do take place any more dangerous. Maternal death should not increase.
But what about direct evidence? Well, now we have that too. This article discusses a recent medical study that examined the change in maternal death rate in Chile when abortion was criminalized in 1989 after being legal since 1965. (Full article also available.) The result? With decades of data before and after criminalization, there is no evidence of any increase in maternal death due to illegal abortions.
This is strong evidence, along with what we already knew, that criminalizing abortion would not lead to a flood of scary, dangerous, coat-hanger abortions.
It’s tempting to write off the small minority of humankind who dislike the Harry Potter books as merely malcontents and misanthropes but for one fact: they are somewhat united in their criticism of the books. This criticism, in a nutshell, is that the Wizarding World and the witches and wizards who inhabit it make no sense.
Neville’s parents were recent Deatheater victims. Nobody thought to try and save them?
For example, in a world where time travel is possible, why did no one ever think of using it to kill Voldermort or at least save some of his victims? The Ministry of Magic had a whole cabinet full of time turners, after all. Maybe there’s some practical or ethical problem that would prevent them from being used in that way, but it seems unbelievable that no one even considers a long-run plan in which they might be useful for something other than letting Hermione overload her course schedule. Surely Sirius might have thought it would be nice to use the trick that saved his life to try and save Lily and James? Surely Harry, after a time turner made him think he saw his father, might have gotten the idea of using the device to go back and see his parents for real?
This is the kind of unreality that can really bother someone who is otherwise perfectly happy to suspend disbelief about the whole magic thing. Potions and spells are fine, but Quirrel repeatedly trying to grab Harry with his bare hands mere moments after using magic to bind him is not. Apparition is acceptable, but a world where wizards can apparate but choose to mostly travel using trains, floo powder, port keys, carriages pulled by griffins, thestrals, broomsticks, dragons, magical underwater pirate ships and the Knight Bus instead isn’t. Ritual duels using a variety of interesting curses and counter-curses seem sensible, but using anything but avada kedavara in an all-out-war seems as absurd as trying to fight a real war with Nerf guns.[ref]A lot of these examples came up in conversations I had with my contrarian friend Reece. You can read his completely wrong-headed criticisms of Rowling’s world-building on his blog.[/ref]
One might argue that only Scrooge would apply this kind of scrutiny to beloved children’s tales. The Wizarding World doesn’t make sense, but who cares? I understand that approach, but in the first case: I can’t help it. Analyzing things is what I do. I couldn’t turn it off I tried.[ref]For that matter, I have tried. No dice.[/ref] In this case, however, something funny happened. The closer I looked at these supposed flaws, the more convinced I became that J. K. Rowling is a world-building genius. If you look carefully, the apparently nonsensical traits of the magical community actually make a very good deal of sense. In fact, given the basic reality of magic in Rowling’s work, there’s no other way the Wizarding World could have turned out.
On Magic
There are two key facts to understand about magic as it exists in Harry Potter. The first is that it’s very rare. How rare? Well, here’s one way to try and estimate the entire population of Wizards in the United Kingdom, just to get a general idea.
Start with the fact that Harry’s first year of Hogwarts was 1991[ref]The date of death on the gravestone of Lilly and James Potter is October 31, 1981. Since Harry was one when they died, his birth day was July 31, 1980. Therefore, he would have started Hogwarts in fall 1991 just after he turned 11.[/ref]. There were 40 first years in his cohort. So if we assume every 11-year old wizard or witch in the UK showed up at Hogwarts we know that there were 40 of them in 1991. Now let’s compare that to the total population of 11-year old kids in the United Kingdom in the same year. We can start with the total population of the UK in 1991: 57,439,000.[ref]Wikipedia[/ref]. The closest age bands I could find were from 2011, but lets just say that’s close enough. In that case, 5.8% of those 57,439,000 were children between the ages of 10 and 14[ref]Wikipedia[/ref], which is 3,331,462. Let’s assume that within that age band equal numbers of kids are 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. So if we divide the total number of the group (3,331,462) by the number of groups (5) we get that there were 666,292 11 year old kids in the UK in 1991. If 40 of them were magic-users, then we can establish a wizard:Muggle ratio of 1:16,657. Now, sure, there were a lot of “ifs” and assumptions along the way, but it’s not a bad start for a ball park estimate, and if that ratio holds true across all ages then there would have been about 3,448 witches and wizards all together in the Unitked Kingdom in 1991.
This is fairly close to J. K. Rowling’s estimate of 3,000 [ref]Harry Potter Wiki[/ref]. Of course it’s possible that not all the eligible 11-year olds in the United Kingdom came to Hogwarts. You might also want to consider Squibs to be part of the wizarding community. Both of these factors would raise the estimate from 3,448. J. K. Rowling stated elsewhere that the total population of Hogwarts was 1,000, and others have used this as a starting point to extrapolate higher numbers for the total population in the range of 12,000 – 15,000[ref]Harry Potter Wiki[/ref] . Even at the high end, however, we’re talking about a population that is at least 99.97% muggle[ref]15,000 / 57,439,000 = 0.026%[/ref]. The magical community is absolutely tiny.
You see that sliver representing 0.03% of the population? No, you probably don’t. That’s because it’s *tiny*.
The second is that magic conveys a tremendous amount of power for very, very little effort. This seems obvious, but it’s impossible to overstate the profound implications of being a person who has secret powers that 99.97% of the rest of the world do not even know exist. As Horace Slughorn showed in The Half-Blood Prince, a wizard can easily live comfortably simply by mooching off of the work of Muggles. There is no such thing as real poverty or want or deprivation in the wizarding world except, as with the Gaunt family as, as a result of stubborn, voluntary arrogance or, as with the Weasley family, apparent indifference. (Ron’s robes may have been unfashionable and their house may have been crowded, but access to housing, food, healthcare, and self-washing dishes was never in question.)
The magical world, in other words, is comprised of a tiny cadre of the ultra-elite where the only scarce resource is status. All the dysfunctional aberrations (by Muggle standards) of the Wizarding World flow from this.
Parasitic
Because witches and wizards don’t have to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, the entire society is basically a parasitic leisure class that depends entirely on the Muggle world. Start with government: the Wizarding World (at least in the United Kingdom) is under the jurisdiction of the Minster of Magic. In the parliamentary system of the United Kingdom, the various ministers are appointed by the Prime Minister and fulfill a role somewhat akin to the Cabinet of a United States President. This means that the head of state for the wizarding community is described by the wizarding community itself as only an adjunct to the larger Muggle government. By this logic, the head of state for witches and wizards in the United States would be just “the Secretary of Magic” (instead of “President”).
The same is true of culture. All wizarding music is depicted as being just magic-themed veresions of contemporary muggle artists. Mrs. Weasley adores her old-timey crooning and the Hogwarts students enjoy the rock and roll of the Weird Sisters. And what about wizarding religion? There is none. The only religious holidays mentioned are Christmas and Easter, but the celebrations seems strictly secular. There is only one explicit instance of religion in Harry Potter, although it’s a very important one. The gravestone of Lilly and James Potter bears a phrase (“The last enemy that shall be conquered is death”) which is taken from one of Paul’s epistle’s to the Corinthians in the New Testament[ref]1 Corinthians 15:26, although the KJV and NIV use “destroyed” instead of “conquered”.[/ref]. To the extent that the wizarding world has any religion at all, it is apparently borrowed directly from the Muggle world.
Even the grand old institution of Hogwarts itself belies a world dependent on Muggle culture and institutions. After all, students do not start until they are 11, by which time they are clearly supposed to have learned basic literacy somewhere else. It’s not clear what that means for pure-bloods like the Weasleys or Malfoys, but at least for those who hail from the muggle world like Harry and Hermione, it means a reliance on public Muggle schools for basic education.
So where do the basic economic goods of the wizarding world come from? Where to the houselves at Hogwarts get the ingredients for their feasts? Where do the tailors at Diagon Alley get the fabric for their robes? Who mines the tin, copper, antimony, and bismuth that go into a cauldron (pewter, standard size 2)? Whether paid for with Muggle money exchanged at Gringotts or “borrowed” a la Slughorn, it is clear that everything that isn’t explicitly magical in the Wizarding World—from government to culture to physical goods—comes directly from the Muggle world, and at effectively no cost.
Backwards
The reason that witches and wizards make so little of their own is quite simply that they don’t have to. In contrast, every aspect of the development of the Muggle world is defined by the constant struggle for scarce resources. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. That is why Muggle society progresses, and it is why the wizarding society does not. Efficiency drives the Muggle world, but it has relatively no influence on a world where anyone can always opt to just coast along and enjoy a comfortable life gleaning off of Muggles.
Although the drive towards invention and efficiency has been a permanent aspect of Muggle society, for most of human history the pace of progress has been glacial. That’s why, with very little effort, wizards and witches had been able to keep pace with Muggle technology until the Industrial Revolution. Telescopes they have, while steam power (to say nothing of electricity) they do not[ref]Sure, there’s the Hogwarts Express, but it’s a single train that runs on the Muggle rail system. They also have the Knight Bus, but it doesn’t mean they have a clue about the internal combustion engine. None of the magical homes are wired for electricity, and there’s no evidence of steam or internal combustion engines being used in any widespread, common way.[/ref]
The technological gap is obvious in Harry Potter, but what is most interesting is the gap in the financial sector. In Muggle history, the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution were predicated on financial innovation of prior centuries. Two of those innovations are conspicuously absent from the wizarding world: representative money and fractional reserve banking.
Witches and wizards, by contrast, are using commodity money: coins that derive their value from the rare metals of which they are composed. In actual history, representative money (which refers to paper money that can be redeemed for valuables) is actually even older than coinage, but it really came to supremacy with banking innovations just prior to the Industrial Revolution, and especially fractional reserve banking.
Fractional reserve banking is the practice of banks lending out more money than they actually have. It sounds a bit crazy, but every banking system in the real world is based on this system. The reason it is important is that it lets money flow freely in the economy to where it is needed most.
Hagrid, and everyone else, calls Gringotts a bank, but as far as the world of Harry Potter is concerned, pretty much the only role Gringott’s provides is a secure place to keep stuff. This has about as much to do with banking as a coat closet has to do with running a restaurant. Gringotts, in other words, is absolutely not a bank by any definition that the muggle world would recognize in the last five or six hundred years.
So the wizarding world is dependent on the Muggle world and mirrors their institutions on Muggle institutions, but over the last few centuries as the pace of Muggle progress has increased exponentially the wizarding world has been left farther and farther behind. They have the façade of Muggle institutions, but only the façade.
The fact that they call it a bank just shows they don’t actually know what a bank is.
Seen this way, there’s no surprise to the fact that wizards travel by all manner of bizarre and inefficient contrivances when—with minimal discomfort and a little bit of organization—they could easily be zipping around the world faster than the speed of light. Everything about the wizarding world is inefficient, not just the travel arrangements.
Shallow
In the Muggle world, a really advanced education requires the 13 years of K-12, 4 more years of undergraduate work, 5 or 6 years of work on a combined masters/doctoral degree and then perhaps another year or two of postdoctoral work for a total of up to 25 years of education. In the wizarding world, 7 years has you covered, maybe 8 or 9 if you want to be an auror.
In the Muggle world, a credible military force requires expensive hardware and serious training. The United Kingdom spends about $60 billion per year on defense spending .[ref]Wikipedia[/ref] In the United States, the costs of training a single Marine are hard to estimate, but good guess would be $50,000 – $150,000 .[ref]NBC[/ref] The deployment costs are much higher, with the US Army spending between $850,000 and $1,500,000 per soldier per year for deployment in Afghanistan.[ref]CNN[/ref] In the Wizarding World, by contrast, a couple dozen teenagers with no special equipment who train in their spare time without adult supervision constitute a credible threat to the standing government.
One big reason for this is simply that, as mentioned previously, the Wizarding World is tiny. The British Armed Forces comprise about 400,000 individuals (active and reserve)[ref]Wikipedia[/ref] out of a total population of about 63 million.[ref]Wikipedia[/ref] That means about 0.63% of the population is in the armed forces. If the wizarding world in the UK has a population of 12,000 and Dumbledore’s Army had 80 members (seems high for the book, but low if the total school population was actually 1,000) then they would represent 0.67% of the total population. And, unlike a typical modern army, they would all be potential combat troops. Just to be clear: 80 high school kids constitute a greater relative military force in the Wizarding World than the entire British army, navy, and air force do in the Muggle world.
I count 25 in this picture, so about 1/3 the combined military might of Britain relative to the Wizarding World, give or take. Do not mess with DA.
The same shallowness works on an individual level. In the Muggle world an unarmed 15 year old doesn’t even register as a threat next to a fully armed SAS team. But in the Wizarding World, you might actually feel the need to deploy an entire squad of their most elite fighters, the aurors, just to bring in a teenage kid. In the Muggle world, a precocious high school student doesn’t hold a candle to the expertise of a newly minted neurosurgeon, but in the Wizarding World the skills of a really talented 7th year student can rival or even surpass those of adult wizards and government officials. The wizarding world is incredibly flat. Setting aside Squibs, there’s very little distance between the least and most knowledgeable or dangerous relative to Muggle society.
Reckless
As a result of all the previous observations, wizarding society is incredibly reckless relative to Muggle society. It’s impossible to get even ballpark mortality estimates because the wizarding world is at war throughout most of Harry Potter, but even the peacetime activities are frightfully dangerous compared to what would be acceptable in a Muggle world. In the very first book, after all, Dumbledore keeps a vicious, man-eating, three-headed dog monster inside a school full of young kids who have a hard time knowing where their classes are. And, oh yeah, Fluffy is separated from the kids by nothing but a locked door that virtually any of the kids can defeat with a trivial spell.[ref]Of course, with the basilisk still locked in the Secret Chamber, Fluffy was only the second most dangerous monster inside the walls of Hogwarts![/ref] From that to Hagrid’s choice of ferocious textbooks to the potentially lethal Tri-Wizard Tournament, wizards all seem a bit deranged when it comes to matters of life and death.
But that sort of makes sense in a world where everyone is carrying the magical equivalent of a loaded bazooka from age 11 whether they want to or not. Ariana Dumbledore’s death is the most tragic example of this: she lived and died in peacetime before either Voldemort or Gridlewald had risen to power. She died simply because her brother got into a fight with his childhood friend. Similarly, Luna’s mother blew herself up messing about with potions. Because magic is so powerful, being a wizard is inherently dangerous, and there’s just no way around it.
But it’s not just individuals who are prone to early demise in the Wizarding World. The entire society itself is incredibly volatile because of all the characteristics noted so far. Wizarding society is completely dependent on Muggle society for its institutions, culture, and basic resources. And yet, because wizards aren’t subject to the same competitive pressures, the link between the Wizarding and Muggle Worlds is increasingly breaking down. This leaves the wizarding institutions increasingly arbitrary and brittle. It’s also a very flat world, where the relative power of the weakest member is very high relative to the most powerful institutions. Add to this the very low numbers of wizards, and it’s clear that the entire society is dangerously volatile and will only become more so with time.
Conclusion
Charles Darwin once noted that the honey bee would obviously be better off if it did not have a barbed stinger. Because the singer is barbed, a honey bee can only sting once before it dies. Wasps and hornets, on the other hand, are capable of stinging many times without suffering injury because they have straight stingers. Obviously it would be better if honey bees had straight stingers. Darwin understood, however, that this is unlikely to happen. The reason for that is simple: evolution doesn’t tend towards optimal results. Natural selection is all about doing the least necessary to survive. Without direct evolutionary pressure, bees will not evolve straight stingers even if it would be better for them to do so.
Humans are the same way. Without external pressure: we stagnate. Because of their incredibly powerful gifts, witches and wizards are largely immune from the pressures to which the rest of human society is constantly subject. On an individual level, this sounds like a lot of fun, and it’s part of the reason that Harry Potter is so much fun to read. But in the long run, the freedom from pressure comes with a serious cost.
The odd behavior of witches and wizards and the bizarre nature of their social institutions is not sloppy world-building. It’s brilliant world-building based on a keen observation of human nature. If a tiny cohort of humans were given incredible magical powers, this is pretty much the world that you would end up with. Parasitic, backwards, shallow, and reckless[ref]This is the same key insight behind Lev Grossman’s bitter and cynical coming-of-age wizard series starting with The Magicians.[/ref]
I really have no idea how much of this was intentional on J. K. Rowling’s part. I haven’t read The Casual Vacancy, but judging by The Cuckoo’s Call (in addition to the Harry Potter books, of course), she is an incredibly astute observer of human nature. My guess is that she didn’t sit down and think “How would a world populated by witches and wizards operate?” My guess is that she just started with a fun premise (hidden magic! wizard school!) that involved certain key attributes (magic is relatively easy and magic users are very rare), and the rest just flowed naturally from there.
In a way, of course, it doesn’t really matter. You can enjoy Harry Potter without analyzing it. But I’m not gonna lie: the fact that it withstands this level of scrutiny so well makes me love the books more then ever, even if it is a darker take on the Wizarding World.
Here’s the most interesting proposition, though. It’s possible that part of what fueled Voldemort’s rise to power was the increasing instability of the Wizarding World as it lagged farther and farther behind Muggle progress. And, since the pace of technological progress shows no sign of slowing down, you have to wonder: what’s the long-run fate of the Wizarding World? How long can this relatively primitive society continue to maintain any social cohesion at all while all its foundational institutions are eroding out from underneath it? If we’re really lucky, maybe one day J. K. Rowling will decide to tell us.
Adam Greenwood has a pretty insightful look at one of the commonly confused aspects of arguing about gay marriage over at Junior Ganymede.
