Lord Malfoy wouldn’t bother with Muggle lawyers, he’d use magic and take what he wants. Remember, he doesn’t see Muggles as people. The only ones who could stop him from doing anything he wanted would be other magic-users.
There has to be some pre-existing mechanism in place to stop this (and also most plain trade). “Take what you want from other people” is too short a sentence in Human Language not to have occurred to various wizards over time, likewise “Imitate the way that person gained status”.
Minerva and Griphook weren’t surprised by the idea of taking raw gold and turning into coins. Presumably this happens sometimes; it’s not the case that all the Galleons in the world were first minted thousands of years ago. So how did the gold in the wizard economy get there in the first place? And what is the mechanism that prevents it now but didn’t prevent it then?
Are all wizards in the world unaware that Muggles possess gold at all? Surely not; Muggles probably own much more gold, and operate many more gold mines, than wizards do. If wizards ever went looking for un-mined gold, they’d encounter Muggle competition.
Wizards have an apparently trivial method of acquiring gold: Apparate into a bank vault, fill your Bag of Holding, Apparate away to Gringotts. It’s doable by most wizards, carries no real risk, is unnoticeable by the bank, untraceable when they do notice the gold is missing, and the other wizards and goblins probably don’t care if some Muggles were robbed by an unknown wizard.
Hypothesis: The muggles don’t possess much gold. Most of the huge stacks of gold in places like Fort Knox are clever magical replicas, and have been for a very long time. Any wizard can easily see through the ruse, but the muggles are clueless.
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere. Or else, maybe fake magic gold is a really good conductor.
If most of the gold we think is in the Muggle economy is really in the wizarding economy, then wizards possess up to 170,000 tons of gold. 100,000 tons of gold divided between 1 million wizards is 100 Kg = 20,000 Galleons per wizard on average.
We actually observe that 100,000 galleons is a princely ransom and a rich fortune. Lord Malfoy is one of the richest people in Britain and he probably has on the order of a million Galleons. This seems compatible but somewhat unlikely; I would estimate less gold in the wizarding economy than 100,000 tons. And yet if they stole all the Muggle gold they’d have closer to 150,000 tons, not counting whatever they may have mined themselves.
Perhaps the only difference between fake gold and real gold is magical—if there’s a ritual that permanently transfigures a rock into gold, people can switch that with the gold in vaults. Of course, no one in the magical world would accept transfigured gold as payment.
And what about all the new gold the muggles mine, day by day? Wouldn’t that cause inflation in the wizard economy? And where does the swapped-out gold go?
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere.
When a muggle handles fake gold and it doesn’t work as a conductor, the Statue of Secrecy comes in and they get Obliviated and the gold gets swapped over so that it works properly.
If most Muggle gold is a clever Wizard fake, then the fakes are getting watched to ensure that those who handle the fake gold stay convinced that it’s real gold.
That’s an awful lot of surveillance. Would a spell which detects a Muggle trying to use jewelry/store of value gold for conduction and sounds an alarm be possible?
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods. So if you want to come up with gold by the tonne, you need to either actually engage muggles in trade (eewww) or go hunting for treasure with no (living) owners.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all. Lucius is a political creature, so he needs ways to bribe idiots, but a wizard that keeps their newt skills up to scratch is pretty much carrying around a cornucopia machine in their pocket. Sure, you could spend a bunch of effort and rob a bank, then use that gold to have a house built.. Or, you know, save yourself the hassle and raise a cute little tower from the bones of the earth/bend space and live like a king in a post office box.. ect.
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods.
That is the first suggestion that would actually work. It’s just that I can’t believe that the average wizard thinks of muggles as persons (or humans) that can be stolen from. It’s less plausible than that they would care about the stability of the economy.
Besides, what magic can create, magic can destroy. People would invest serious effort in developing magic that would erase the “magical signature” of stolen gold if it would help them become billionaires.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all.
The reason bribing people with money works in the first place, is that most people don’t have as much money as they would like. If wizards didn’t really need money, as you suggest, then they wouldn’t care about it and couldn’t be bribed.
Since money translates into power over others, Lucius too would always want more money.
It’s just that I can’t believe that the average wizard thinks of muggles as persons (or humans) that can be stolen from.
I don’t know. They have a fairly insular view of the world, but putting them on a par with animals seems to be a fringe notion, albeit one popular with those in power (ie purebloods.)
The reason bribing people with money works in the first place, is that most people don’t have as much money as they would like. If wizards didn’t really need money, as you suggest, then they wouldn’t care about it and couldn’t be bribed.
Magical goods can be sold for money, and therefore are. You want a new broomstick? Pay up, bucko.
(Also, food is hard to create magically, according to canon, although God only knows how that works.)
“Right? You’re Muggles,” said the boy. He smiled twistedly. “You have as much standing in the magical British legal system as mice. No wizard is going to care about any arguments you make about rights, about fairness, they won’t even take the time to listen. You don’t have any power, see, so they don’t have to bother.”
Admittedly he was overstating it to make a point, but it’s still mostly true.
Perhaps wizards are superstitious and believe that stolen gold is cursed (or perhaps it actually is.) It’s a bit of a ridiculous explanation, but it’s not implausible that wizards would be easily susceptible to superstition or weird curses. And there are plenty of benefits of either spreading the rumor or creating actual curses, since they don’t like theft either. That it benefits muggles is just an accident, not their intention.
Are there notable instances of wizards stealing gold (or other precious objects) from other wizards and/or muggles? If there are, are any of them every cursed due to the inherent act of theft?
Nothing for gold that I recall, but Mundungus Fletcher stole a bunch of heirloom silverware and other such valuable things from Grimmauld place after Sirius died, and possibly even while he was alive, and didn’t seem to be particularly cursed, just throttled by Harry for disrespect to Sirius’s memory.
On the other hand with Sirius’s attitude towards his relatives he could easily have made a statement declaring his disinterest in his heritage that intentionally or unintentionally revoked his ownership over such items.
Fletcher is portrayed as a sketchy thief/fence pretty much from book 1, IIRC. It’s hard to imagine that so many people could have intentionally or not abandoned their magical ownership as to make such a career feasible.
He refers to cauldrons that “fell off the back of a broomstick”. Perhaps he meant it literally?
But no, he tells an amusing story about stealing toads from a fellow thief and selling them back to him. It’s clear that their relationship is built on selling each other things they “nicked”.
“Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods”
This makes a lot of sense. In a society where theft from even most wizards should be theoretically pretty easy, blanket ‘anti-theft’ measures seem most workable. Which, of course, implies that ownership is an intrinsic property of matter in the wizarding verse. Ayn Rand would squee.
Alternative; HPMOR is a sometimes a sideways critique of the Rowling universe, and should, perhaps, sometimes be viewed in that light.
Rowling’s universe does have poor wizards, and it does have money and currency constraints. Gold seems to be both intrinsically valuable and rare which is strange. There do seem to be strong cultural taboos against interaction with muggles, despite the obvious benefits (gold, sex, etc.) But the origin of those taboos have never been adequately explained. Such an explanation might allow for a Voldemort who was guided by something other than a quest for personal power, but who was some matrix-esque control mechanism from Atlantis. But I don’t want to get too Deus Ex Maquina in my explanations if something better presents itself. In any case, the taboos could easily be outdated. The existence of long-lived wizards suggests a larger ratio of old people to young, and a more conservative society (as in ‘resistant to change’) in general.
Alternately perhaps Harry’s experiment regarding inheritance was wrong or inadequate in some way and magic really can be diluted by interacting/breeding with muggles. We’ve been told that the most powerful wizards tend to have few children. Grindelwald seems to have been Gay. Dumbledore is both Gay and childless/asexual in his adult life. If we assume a given number of Atlantean ‘magic markers’ (genetic markers which confer magic ability, which is what a strict Mendelian wizarding gene is likely to be ;-) ) then perhaps having a larger number of a particular marker in a population really WOULD decrease the average power of anyone else who held one of those markers. This would allow for the cultural evolution of a wizarding world that was strongly insular, since familiarity breeds children and indiscriminate genetic dispersal would lead to collapse or diminishment of that family’s wizarding powers.
Which suggests that either Neville has a lot of distant relatives somewhere, or remarkable magical potential.
Well, in canon you need to pay for food—although it’s mentioned that you can cast enlarging charms o food you already have. Aaand … that’s kinda it. Water, free. Shelter free. Furniture, free.. Transport, free. Magical artifacts, to be fair, will cost you somewhat, so entertainment, medicine (is it mentioned if St. Mungos is public healthcare?), and certain conveniences (owls, broomsticks, floo powder …) will require a least intermittent income, but I would say an unemployed wizard is still quite comfortable compared to a muggle. And most magic items will last for years or decades, judging by the Weasleys.
Maybe the goblins have established some sort of monopoly on Galleon production, and regulate the amount of it that may be produced in one year? Plausibly the wizards might support that kind of a monopoly to prevent rampant inflation and destabilization of the economy.
Even if their knowledge of economics hadn’t caught up with muggles and they were still thinking in mercantilist terms (and so didn’t properly understand the concept of inflation), they could still understand that things will remain more stable that way. There have always been monopolies on the production of the official currency, with counterfeiters being harshly punished, and the (guild-like) goblins controlling it would fit with the general “old-fashioned” nature of the wizarding world.
If the goblins allow wizards to bring in gold to be minted, as Griphook told Harry, then how would they decide what wizards to work with? Every wizard can steal an effectively unlimited amount of gold from Muggle vaults. If many wizards did so, and then the goblins refused to turn most of that gold into Galleons, this would probably act to break their monopoly as a market in gold and/or other coins naturally emerged.
Unless wizards all agree not to value raw gold at all, only Galleons. That seems implausible.
Unless wizards all agree not to value raw gold at all, only Galleons. That seems implausible.
Why? There are vast advantages in using the currency that everyone else accepts. Real-world alternative currencies rarely replace the official national currencies, either. (Even if you believed that Bitcoin had the potential to eventually do so, gold and Galleons are both physical currencies, so gold wouldn’t have the advantages of a digital cryptocurrency.)
Muggles have never agreed not to value gold, even though vastly more money exists in non-gold-backed currencies today. Which is why those gold vaults still exist.
On the other hand, the main reason Muggles value gold is for jewelry, and it’s more likely that wizards use magic to substitute.
But, again, the fact is that Griphook agrees to convert gold into Galleons at only 5% overhead. So even if a wizard only values Galleons, he’ll want to acquire gold and give it to Griphook.
Griphook says earlier in the fic that “only a fool would trust anything other than goblin stamped galleons”, or words to that effect. So maybe wizards are free to trade gold with Muggles, but raw gold is easy to fake, so nobody is interested in raw gold, and only galleons are valuable. The goblins will stamp some galleons for you for a fee, but they don’t want to hyper-inflate the economy so they only do small batches. Either its near-impossible to fake up galleons, or the threat of goblin war against counterfeiters is too scary for people to try. Or have I missed something?
Either its near-impossible to fake up galleons, or the threat of goblin war against counterfeiters is too scary for people to try.
I think you’re onto something. Specifically, in the books, Goblins possess magic metalworking techniques wizards don’t know how to duplicate—and they know how to detect them. (It’s a point of contention as part of the whole “give us wands” thing.)
What if the Galleons are actually fake gold created by Goblins, and they can tell ‘fake’ currency because it’s real?
You’re suggesting that there are two substances, difficult to tell apart, both called “gold”. On what grounds does one decide which to think of as “the real thing” and which to think of as “an imitation of the real thing”?
On the grounds that if the goblins can tell them apart, there must be some difference. Remember, something doesn’t need to have a physical use to have value—see Bitcoin, or intellectual property, or stock options. Simple scarcity is sufficient to create value if people decide to value it.
Simple scarcity is sufficient to create value if people decide to value it.
“If people decide to value it” makes that a tautology. Leaving that aside, scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. The only surviving painting by a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci of little renown will be valued, but less than one by Leonardo.
Silver has two stable isotopes, in roughly equal proportions. I doubt there’s much monisotopically refined silver in the world. It would cost more to make it, but it wouldn’t be worth more, unless someone wanted some that badly for a practical purpose.
As phrased it’s tautological, but my point was the implication—people can choose to value whatever they want, value is not intrinsic to an item. Lack of scarcity does provide an upper cap, though—air will never be valuable on the surface of Earth—so if people have chosen to value something, then scarcity is the remaining factor needed for it to have value. (I phrased it poorly, but I think it’s still strictly correct)
air will never be valuable on the surface of Earth
Actually, some cities have featured “air stations” or “air bars” due to smog, historically. I don’t know if they still exist, I haven’t heard of a contemporary one.
But which is “real” and which is “fake”? “Real” and “fake” are not objective properties of things. If only goblins can tell the two golds apart, why would anyone care? For practical purposes, for everyone else except Harry Potter there would just be “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 1” and “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 2″. Harry would be trying to find out what objective properties distinguish them.
The goblins are the central bankers of the wizarding world. They are entrusted with providing a reasonable money supply, and they’re free to use methods of their choice to create that(well, subject to assorted speciesist laws). I don’t care why the Federal Reserve says to use cotton money instead of plastic, as long as they run the money supply sufficiently well that I trust them.
I don’t believe that goblins’ magical power could outsmart that of wizards in this way. Particularly with the emphasis on wizards having access to wands and spells.
But then goblins would still want wizards to bring in real gold for “minting”. And wizards would still steal or trade for all the Muggle gold to give to goblins, and billions of Galleons would be circulating as a result. And we don’t observe that.
But does the Ministry—who are the ones with aurors—want muggles wondering why there’s so little gold nowadays? Not to mention the sudden rich people messing up the established power balance.
Again, why would the Ministry not take the gold for themselves instead of guarding it for the Muggles? Note that the explanation has to hold across all of recorded history, in many nations and times.
Why would the Ministry do that? I’m kind of drawing a blank here. Sure, the Magical government (maybe not the Ministry, since you can be fined for breaking the statute of secrecy) could probably pull it off (although it would have all sorts of repercussions.) But … I’m having a hard time imagining them doing so.
Honestly, can you imagine a Muggle government doing something like that? I mean, it’s not perfectly analogous, but I’d say your average army could fill in for magic here.
I didn’t mean the Ministry would steal Muggle gold and put it in the Ministry fund. I meant some Minister, or Head Auror, or other well-connected person, would steal it for himself (plus bribes to the guards to look the other way).
And yes, I totally believe that Muggle ministers would do that if they could, and in fact have done so many times in Muggle history.
I didn’t mean the Ministry would steal Muggle gold and put it in the Ministry fund. I meant some Minister, or Head Auror, or other well-connected person, would steal it for himself (plus bribes to the guards to look the other way).
Oh, right. Yeah, that’s a bit more plausible, I have to admit.
And yet … still very hard. Unless you’re already really really rich? I guess?
And yes, I totally believe that Muggle ministers would do that if they could, and in fact have done so many times in Muggle history.
It used to be that governments would debase their coinage whenever they needed money. Today, of course, we’re all taught that constant inflation is good for us.
Which, while admittedly very annoying to those poor suckers who already possess money, is rather different to launching a strike team to physically empty bank vaults.
Everyone does what they can. There have been many incidencts when Muggle governments expropriated privately owned gold (or other riches). They wouldn’t do it to themselves, of course, so the central bank vaults remained safe.
But the point is, only the arbiters of ultimate power (or their clients) can be truly rich; if anyone else is richer than they are, they will tend to take the riches by force. In the HP-verse, wizards have the ultimate power.
Except wizards don’t view themselves as the “arbiters of ultimate power” over the Muggles. Statute of Secrecy.
Now Voldemort, I admit, would probably have done something like this once he took power. Or Grindelwald. But neither of them won, so… manifestly, no wizard has successfully seized power to rule over the Muggles (except maybe waay back and it got covered up) because the SoS is still a thing.
Wizards have an apparently trivial method of acquiring gold: Apparate into a bank vault, fill your Bag of Holding, Apparate away to Gringotts. It’s doable by most wizards, carries no real risk, is unnoticeable by the bank, untraceable when they do notice the gold is missing, and the other wizards and goblins probably don’t care if some Muggles were robbed by an unknown wizard.
My guess is that they actually do care, if only because they don’t want Muggles getting too suspicious.
But yes, minor rights violations probably go on; the books note that dosing a muggle you have a crush on with love potion is seen as romantic.
Serious problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production = 2700 metric tons annually produced today. If there are one million wizards in the world, it takes 1000 tons of gold to have one kilogram of gold / 200 Galleons per person (~$50K at today’s prices). Or they have to produce a ton a year for a thousand years. How much gold was in pre-industrial e.g. Aztec civilization?
That’s a good point. I also add that Wikipedia says that:
A total of 174,100 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history, according to GFMS as of 2012.
But still, if just a few wizards stole appreciable fractions of the Muggle gold vaults, they would be individually very rich. The same 1000 tons of gold would be a (ETA fixed calculation) 200 million Galleon fortune if owned by one wizard. Therefore, the question is how much gold is concentrated in one place (already mined) and available for stealing.
Wikipedia provides a list of officially reported gold holdings by country. The top few are: US, 8133 tons; Germany, 3391 tons; IMF, 2814 tons; Italy, 2451 tons; France, 2435 tons.
But where is the gold physically kept? Well, Wikipedia says that Fort Knox holds 4578 tons of gold. In any case, a wizard could Apparate to people, ask them where most of the gold is (Legilimency/Veritaserum/Imperius), Memory-Charm to erase the few minutes of the encounter, and Apparate away. If the person doesn’t know where the gold is, they can tell you who does know. Start with someone like a bank CEO, unlikely to have magical protection (unlike heads of state), and work your way on—in a day or two you’ll find the gold.
How do we know this hasn’t actually happened? The gold in the bank vaults may not be actually there. But the wizarding economy doesn’t have a known history of occasional sudden billionaires. Lucius probably never even heard about fortunes of more than a few million Galleons.
There’s another big pile of gold, about 7,000 tonnes, in the New York Fed—that’s actually where a lot of foreign countries keep a large fraction of their gold supply. It’s open to tourists and you can walk in and look at the big stacks of gold bars. It does have fairly impressive security, but that security could plausibly be defeated by a reasonably competent wizard.
More to the point, whatever security Muggle vaults had 100 or 200 years ago definitely wouldn’t have stood up to wizards. (Their powers wane by the year, while ours wax.) Since all the Muggle gold didn’t vanish long ago, there must be a different explanation than Muggle vault security.
Possibly, but why couldn’t it have happened prior? There was plenty of gold around in the ancient world, and not enough of it got stolen. Nor is enough sitting in the wizarding economy.
Muggle society could hire wizards to punish thieves.
Wizards would know more muggles personally.
Maybe there really were fortunes made in those days, and it was covered up on our end. (Small fortunes, because muggles hadn’t had time to mine as much gold?)
It doesn’t matter that much if some wannabe thieves get caught. Only one thief needs to succeed per vault per century to make all the Muggle gold disappear. An alarm isn’t enough against several wizards who take the time to prepare a raid. Only a round the clock guard would be enough. If Aurors guard all the big Muggle gold vaults (or that the goblins or their dragons do), that might be a sufficient deterrent.
What isn’t clear is why they would install alarms or provide guards, instead of just taking the gold themselves.
Only one thief needs to succeed per vault per century to make all the Muggle gold disappear.
Well, if it’s an unusual idea to start with, and hard to hide—I mean, if you don’t get suddenly and suspiciously rich, what’s the point? - and most people get filtered out because their brilliant and original plan was actually anticipated (remember, the whole point of stealing from muggles is that they wont have magical protections) … I can see it being pretty much a non-starter.
Also, is that actually true? I mean, there’s only so much gold per vault, only so much time for this to have happened in, and so on. Heck, would we even still use vaults if “police baffled by fort knox raid” showed up on the news every so often, to the point that the majority of Earth’s gold was lost that way?
there’s only so much gold per vault, only so much time for this to have happened in
There’s enough gold per value to make a successful thief the richest wizard in the world. And there have been big gold vaults for many centuries, with royal treasuries preceding them. And yet there hasn’t been even one case in Muggle history of all the gold disappearing from a vault without explanation.
would we even still use vaults if “police baffled by fort knox raid” showed up on the news every so often
A thief could still succeed once. That we still use vaults indicates a thief has never succeeded. There’s still something to explain.
There’s enough gold per value to make a successful thief the richest wizard in the world. And there have been big gold vaults for many centuries, with royal treasuries preceding them. And yet there hasn’t been even one case in Muggle history of all the gold disappearing from a vault without explanation.
Funnily enough, it occurred to me that I have no idea if any such cases have occurred. I still don’t, because all the top Google hits seem to be conspiracy theories or something about how various gold reserves are totally empty. (Maybe a coverup would actually be possible with magic? Hmm … Fort Knox hasn’t been audited in 60 years, supposedly, so who knows?)
But honestly, who cares if you’re the “richest wizard in the world” if you’re in jail and your “wealth” is an unspendable stolen asset (remember, raw gold needs to be converted into coins)?
A thief could still succeed once.
Yeah, I just meant that muggles wouldn’t actually lose all the gold. It’s a moot point, since clearly this hasn’t happened either way.
A little digging suggests less than a thousand tons. Most of the metal wealth extracted by the Spanish empire was in the form of silver, not gold. The spanish were able to mine about a ton a year from hispanola for some unknown period, and the inca paid a ransom of 24 tons for their king.
So that Hermione found a wizarding way to make money (as she was trying to do) through trade with the Muggle world, and was assasinated by this mechanism?
It’s (relatively) easy to handwave into being prohibitions on theft—pretty much every society dislikes it and you can posit both morality and anti-theft magics as making outright thieving to be not too useful for wizards.
On the other hand trade is generally seen as good and there are huge and obvious benefits to trade between Muggles and wizards. Especially given how easy it would be for less scrupulous wizards to make sure the terms of trade are very very beneficial to them (and yet do not descend into outright theft).
I’m not sure the problem is solvable without introducing major new mechanisms of how the world works.
Many, many post-agricultural societies have restrained trade, often to particular privileged individuals. I believe this is what a ‘patent’ used to be.
Many, many post-agricultural societies have restrained trade, often to particular privileged individuals.
Yes, but notice what this implies. This implies that trade is such an awesome value-producing mechanism that we (=elites with political power) want to keep it for ourselves and our friends.
The idea is not to forbid trade, the idea is to restrict access and thus collect what the econospeak calls rents. Everyone wants to be a gatekeeper at a fountain of gold.
This usually requires that the person holding the patent provide enough trade to satisfy demand. Otherwise the pressure to create a black market is irresistible. So trade could be restricted to a few powerful wizards—perhaps to each wizarding government—but it could not be eliminated entirely.
And since wizards can provide extremely valuable services to Muggles in trade, they would capture almost all the Muggle gold in return. Then we would observe wizarding billionaires, making fortunes of a 100,000 Galleons negligible in comparison. That we don’t observe this is strong evidence that trade either doesn’t exist at all or is universal and unrestricted. Since the story offers ample proof that trade isn’t universal, it must be nonexistent. But it’s not clear what is preventing trade.
Wizarding culture. Trade with muggles was basically worthless until a single wizard’s lifetime ago, so the prejudice hasn’t had time to evolve away yet.
I recall reading that somewhere (maybe Pottermore?), Rowling said that the Malfoys gained their great family wealth by trade with muggles, until the establishment of the statute of secrecy, at which point they were quick to join the “Yep, we knew those dirty muggles just wanted to exploit and burn us all along!” crowd. I don’t remember if there is any similar detail about other wealthy families in canon or MoR; there’s Flamel with the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Potters with a combination family inheritance/bounty on Voldemort, but the Malfoys appear to be decidedly the richest family in Magical Britain, and I’d imagine that even with a 400 year gap, being those to most thoroughly exploit trade with muggles would be more than sufficient to explain their success.
Muggles had a lot of gold a hundred years ago, too. Certainly if you count in terms of just a few wizards taking possession of it. And it was easier to find because currencies were gold-backed.
If they were unwilling to just steal it (for whatever reason), then spending a few weeks performing services for the richest people in the world in exchange for half their wealth (amounting to many millions of Galleons) would have been a great bargain for wizards.
On the other hand trade is generally seen as good and there are huge and obvious benefits to trade between Muggles and wizards.
The mutual benefits of trade are non-obvious to humans, and many cultures have seen merchants as low-status because of a naive notion that they don’t contribute anything.
In most societies, there was no remotely adequate solution to the problems of tracking reputations and punishing violations of trust for merchants who operated outside the narrow circle of their own communities. So merchants were largely viewed as scammers because they mostly were; nothing naive about it.
Second thought: of course dishonest merchants exist, but it’s also true that merchants upset static status arrangements like controlling land being the only important thing.
I don’t think this is historically true. Humans actively traded since paleolithic times (there are archeological finds like amber far away inland or stone tools made out of stone that does not occur anywhere locally).
Merchants were typically seen as of lower status than the nobles and the military (for rather obvious reasons), but of higher status than craftsmen and peasants.
I think even simpler than this is the fact that the wizards don’t have anything of worth to trade to the Muggles, since non-magical people have a hard time even seeing magical artifacts, much less using them.
Muggles have plenty of things that would be useful to Wizards, but the reverse isn’t true.
Wizards have plenty to trade to Muggles—by providing services, not products.
Magical cures to deadly diseases and accidents. A replicable cure can’t be traded, but wizards can individually cure powerful and wealthy people. (Harry speculates that wizards would probably cure cancer in members of the Muggle government.)
Military and covert operations, assassinations, coups, revolutions, etc. Apparate in, kill the enemy government and generals, win the war. Toppling any regime in the world that hasn’t purchased magical protection of its own would give you a lot of money. In fact, every wizarding community should be able to demand arbitrary amounts of protection money from its local Muggles.
Theft and spying (industrial and government).
Subversion and interrogation of enemy leaders (by Legilimency, Veritaserum, Imperius.)
Creation of single-action devices via Transmutation (like some of the things Harry tried in his experiments). Muggles can then study, analyze, experiment on, or copy the Transmuted devices while they last.
Transportation. Launch satellites by Apparating into orbit! Rescue trapped people!
A wizard could easily play a Muggle Superman—flying, being invincible, combatting crime...
Creation of single-action devices via Transmutation (like some of the things Harry tried in his experiments). Muggles can then study, analyze, experiment on, or copy the Transmuted devices while they last.
Well, it’s not clear why it failed exactly. It might have been because it never existed before, but it seems more likely to me that it was because Harry didn’t know what it was exactly. He didn’t try to transmute “this molecular structure I have in my mind”, he tried to transmute “a substance I know nothing about except that it cures Alzheimer’s”. That was probably not specific enough for the spell. (Otherwise, why not transmute a black-box device with a big red “kill Voldemort where-ever he is” button, or a mysterious “bring a dead body back to life” device?)
In any case there are things who physical properties we know, and which exist or have existed, but would be very valuable to create in laboratories. Like creating a string of DNA to order, which can then replicate itself into ordinary non-transmuted matter—very valuable in 1993!
Nothing of worth? The canon explanation for the Wizarding world’s masquerade, from just a few chapters into the series, is that wizards would be in such demand by muggles that it would be too irritating and waste too much time.
Magical goods maybe, magical services certainly not. There are many things that magic could do to add value to non-magical objects, which then do not require any further magic to sustain (see Harry and Hermione’s discussion about helping to manufacture nanotechnology and/or Alzheimer’s cures).
There’s a long history of witch hunts inquisitions etc. a taboo on wizard muggle interactions makes sense and is consistent with history. It’s also has the merit of requiring fewer other pieces to be set up for it to work as an explanation.
This is a huge problem with HP, and pretty much all urban fantasy; and most especially ones that posit an entire separate magical society. There are just too many plot devices like the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy needed to keep the story world looking anything like the real world does.
The point about lawyers is just that Harry sees the wizard world as rather quaint and old-fashioned; Lucius is a big frog in a very tiny pond. Let the Masquerade be broken in any serious way, and within a year or two Muggle Britain will have produced anti-curse body armour (possibly made of tinfoil) and guns that will reliably break a wizard’s shields. In other words, it’s not just wizard lawyers that are cute; wizard soldiers are also fundamentally non-serious. This may not be actually true, but I think it is what Harry believes.
By the way, in the Rowling-verse, the Prime Minister is supposed to know about the Ministry of Magic; he’s the one official point of contact between Muggles and wizards. I wonder if that’s also true in the canonical version?
By the way, in the Rowling-verse, the Prime Minister is supposed to know about the Ministry of Magic; he’s the one official point of contact between Muggles and wizards. I wonder if that’s also true in the canonical version?
Did you just upgrade HPMoR to canon, and downgrade the Rowling-verse to non-canon? Bwa-ha-ha!
I’ve done that with Luminosity and Radiance over the four Twilight books (and I’ve only read the latter because of the former), and will probably do that with MoR once it’s actually complete.
It’s not body armor and such that matters. It’s control. Wizards have mind magic. They can alter memories and control people. That would let them act through agents who already possess muggle resources, and who already understand (and can explain whenever necessary) the strengths of the muggle world.
At the end of the day, if wizards seriously get interested in the muggle world, and muggles in the wizard world (not that they should get the chance, if the Malfoys are smart), and both learn about each others’ strengths, wizards will still be the ones with the edge.
Body armor only protects against weak curses like Somnium that are standard first year hexes. Stupefy, which is castable by first years, is not blocked by armor.
I think you are rather missing my point, here. The body armour that Muggle Britain would invent would not be the kind available to Harry as a desperate improvisation. In a year or two, after a crash research program, Muggle Britain would understand how magic works, what materials block it, and would mass-produce the resulting body armour that does block curses up to and including Avada Kedavra. It would be based on tinfoil because everyone knows that tinfoil hats block the government’s mind-controlling rays.
1) Same reason muskets trump trained knights and longbowmen. Even though heavy plate was actually effective against primitive firearms, and longbows worked more reliably and with excellent range, you could kit out a peasant with an arquebus for much less than the cost of mounting and armoring a knight, and a fraction of the training (you had to train for years to be able to fight effectively in mail or on horseback and drawing a longbow was an elite skill that required extreme muscle hypertrophy. It took a few hours to learn how to operate your firearm, and a few weeks to learn how to coordinate with other peasants.) Similarly, even if wizards were significantly more lethal and/or survivable than dudes with carbines, they’d be incredibly outnumbered.
2) In the Harry Potter World, combat magic is really weak. It’s almost all short range and slow, often nonlethal, rarely provides area effects, and nobody really trains it. Automatic weapons have cyclic rates of hundreds or even thousands of rounds per minute, and trained operators can hit a target at half a mile or more. And that’s just small arms. They wouldn’t even need special anti-magic weapons, unless the wizards were extremely well organized.
With regards to (2), I think you’re confusing first-year war games with actual combat magic.
Actual “I really want to kill you” spells are probably much more powerful. Fiendfyre for example has at least the destructive potential of a tank, and in canon even Goyle could cast it. (It’s hard to control, but then again so is a tank.) Avada Kedavra can probably kill you even through a nuclear bunker wall, and it can be used by at least some teenagers. Sectumsempra is probably a instant-kill against a muggle, even with body armor, and it was invented by Snape while he was still a student.
By contrast, pretty much the most powerful potential weapon normal people (well, outside the US at least) have ready access to is a car, and a very tiny fraction of people can easily make something much more destructive than a crude bomb. Also, due to the effects of magic on electronics, pretty much everything other than kinetic impactors would be fried by any kind of spell that manages to connect.
We’re never shown really bad stuff, and during a discussion in MoR it’s mentioned that thermonuclear weapons are only a bit worse than most really bad spells, and that Atlantis was erased from time.
I might counter that most combat magic, even the adult sort, seems to be line-of-sight, which is a huge handicap. It also seems to be very inaccurate. If Harry & Co can literally dodge Deatheaters on foot and brooms, supersonic jets and HALO insertions are going to be really hard to target. Not to mention artillery shells in flight. And Wizards seem weirdly resistant to (biased against?) using magical heavy weapons or fire team tactics. They have a real duelist mentality.
But the ability to erase from time does really trump. I concede.
Dodging Deatheaters (at least competent ones) on a broom is not something I expect to happen in MoR. Well, not unless it’s rocket powered, and I wouldn’t expect that to work more than once either.
Most of the big, non-line-of-sight weapons we (muggles) have arose for the purpose of killing lots of people in big battles (even though we’re using them of other stuff now), which isn’t really useful for wizards due to their low numbers, but:
The Interdict of Merlin is MoR-specific, and at the beginning of the Ministry chapters it is specifically mentioned that the purpose of that was to prevent what appeared to be the wizard equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. So in while magic can probably get really bad, you’re probably right that living wizards in MoR don’t know anymore extremely destructive non-line-of-sight spells, or at least they’re very rare.
(Though that doesn’t mean that they aren’t much more powerful than handguns. I expect almost every spell thrown in that Quirrell–auror duel was above “high caliber machine gun” in deadliness, were it not for the shields.)
I grant 1), of course. But wizards have shields that ought to be proof against handguns. My question was asked in response to the line “guns that will reliably break a wizard’s shields”.
Well, first you have to ask whether wizard shields actually do prevent inert lumps of lead from hitting their caster. They seem well-optimised for stopping charms, but presumably that relies on the magic in the charms, opposed by the magic in the shields. No doubt a wizard can shield against firearms, but do they as a matter of routine?
Second, because Muggle Britain has thousands of scientists who would like nothing better than to crack the Secret Of Magic and, incidentally, mass-produce magic bullets each with the force of a low-level anti-shield charm. Which you can then fire from machine guns wielded by conscripts with two weeks’ training.
ask whether wizard shields actually do prevent inert lumps of lead from hitting their caster
Almost certainly they do. Minerva mentions that guns aren’t a big threat to a prepared witch, and even if you assume she’s not really knowledgeable, I’m pretty sure someone would have tried throwing (with magic) hard, heavy things at their opponent during life-and-death fights. Or at least using bows and arrows.
In other words, it’s not just wizard lawyers that are cute; wizard soldiers are also fundamentally non-serious.
I wouldn’t say that they aren’t dangerous, but I agree that they’re unserious. Harry is one of an apparently very limited number who takes wizarding power seriously enough to learn how it works, and really think creatively about how it can be leveraged.
Lord Malfoy wouldn’t bother with Muggle lawyers, he’d use magic and take what he wants. Remember, he doesn’t see Muggles as people. The only ones who could stop him from doing anything he wanted would be other magic-users.
There has to be some pre-existing mechanism in place to stop this (and also most plain trade). “Take what you want from other people” is too short a sentence in Human Language not to have occurred to various wizards over time, likewise “Imitate the way that person gained status”.
Minerva and Griphook weren’t surprised by the idea of taking raw gold and turning into coins. Presumably this happens sometimes; it’s not the case that all the Galleons in the world were first minted thousands of years ago. So how did the gold in the wizard economy get there in the first place? And what is the mechanism that prevents it now but didn’t prevent it then?
Are all wizards in the world unaware that Muggles possess gold at all? Surely not; Muggles probably own much more gold, and operate many more gold mines, than wizards do. If wizards ever went looking for un-mined gold, they’d encounter Muggle competition.
Wizards have an apparently trivial method of acquiring gold: Apparate into a bank vault, fill your Bag of Holding, Apparate away to Gringotts. It’s doable by most wizards, carries no real risk, is unnoticeable by the bank, untraceable when they do notice the gold is missing, and the other wizards and goblins probably don’t care if some Muggles were robbed by an unknown wizard.
Hypothesis: The muggles don’t possess much gold. Most of the huge stacks of gold in places like Fort Knox are clever magical replicas, and have been for a very long time. Any wizard can easily see through the ruse, but the muggles are clueless.
How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere. Or else, maybe fake magic gold is a really good conductor.
If most of the gold we think is in the Muggle economy is really in the wizarding economy, then wizards possess up to 170,000 tons of gold. 100,000 tons of gold divided between 1 million wizards is 100 Kg = 20,000 Galleons per wizard on average.
We actually observe that 100,000 galleons is a princely ransom and a rich fortune. Lord Malfoy is one of the richest people in Britain and he probably has on the order of a million Galleons. This seems compatible but somewhat unlikely; I would estimate less gold in the wizarding economy than 100,000 tons. And yet if they stole all the Muggle gold they’d have closer to 150,000 tons, not counting whatever they may have mined themselves.
… and Eliezer raised the value of Galleons significantly for this fic. Hmm...
What Wizards even know that electrical conductivity is a thing?
Perhaps the only difference between fake gold and real gold is magical—if there’s a ritual that permanently transfigures a rock into gold, people can switch that with the gold in vaults. Of course, no one in the magical world would accept transfigured gold as payment.
And what about all the new gold the muggles mine, day by day? Wouldn’t that cause inflation in the wizard economy? And where does the swapped-out gold go?
Alternately: The wizards already mined all the real gold too.
It’s like bitcoin mining—whoever steals Muggle gold first gets to keep it. Of course that’s the Americans.
Harry’s going to be disappointed when he gets muggle rich, and Gringottts rejects all his muggle gold
When a muggle handles fake gold and it doesn’t work as a conductor, the Statue of Secrecy comes in and they get Obliviated and the gold gets swapped over so that it works properly.
If most Muggle gold is a clever Wizard fake, then the fakes are getting watched to ensure that those who handle the fake gold stay convinced that it’s real gold.
That’s an awful lot of surveillance. Would a spell which detects a Muggle trying to use jewelry/store of value gold for conduction and sounds an alarm be possible?
Well, it’s magic. Meaning ‘If the author wants it to be’.
That’s not what it means in this fic.
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods. So if you want to come up with gold by the tonne, you need to either actually engage muggles in trade (eewww) or go hunting for treasure with no (living) owners.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all. Lucius is a political creature, so he needs ways to bribe idiots, but a wizard that keeps their newt skills up to scratch is pretty much carrying around a cornucopia machine in their pocket. Sure, you could spend a bunch of effort and rob a bank, then use that gold to have a house built.. Or, you know, save yourself the hassle and raise a cute little tower from the bones of the earth/bend space and live like a king in a post office box.. ect.
That is the first suggestion that would actually work. It’s just that I can’t believe that the average wizard thinks of muggles as persons (or humans) that can be stolen from. It’s less plausible than that they would care about the stability of the economy.
Besides, what magic can create, magic can destroy. People would invest serious effort in developing magic that would erase the “magical signature” of stolen gold if it would help them become billionaires.
The reason bribing people with money works in the first place, is that most people don’t have as much money as they would like. If wizards didn’t really need money, as you suggest, then they wouldn’t care about it and couldn’t be bribed.
Since money translates into power over others, Lucius too would always want more money.
I don’t know. They have a fairly insular view of the world, but putting them on a par with animals seems to be a fringe notion, albeit one popular with those in power (ie purebloods.)
Magical goods can be sold for money, and therefore are. You want a new broomstick? Pay up, bucko.
(Also, food is hard to create magically, according to canon, although God only knows how that works.)
Admittedly he was overstating it to make a point, but it’s still mostly true.
Perhaps wizards are superstitious and believe that stolen gold is cursed (or perhaps it actually is.) It’s a bit of a ridiculous explanation, but it’s not implausible that wizards would be easily susceptible to superstition or weird curses. And there are plenty of benefits of either spreading the rumor or creating actual curses, since they don’t like theft either. That it benefits muggles is just an accident, not their intention.
Are there notable instances of wizards stealing gold (or other precious objects) from other wizards and/or muggles? If there are, are any of them every cursed due to the inherent act of theft?
Nothing for gold that I recall, but Mundungus Fletcher stole a bunch of heirloom silverware and other such valuable things from Grimmauld place after Sirius died, and possibly even while he was alive, and didn’t seem to be particularly cursed, just throttled by Harry for disrespect to Sirius’s memory.
On the other hand with Sirius’s attitude towards his relatives he could easily have made a statement declaring his disinterest in his heritage that intentionally or unintentionally revoked his ownership over such items.
Fletcher is portrayed as a sketchy thief/fence pretty much from book 1, IIRC. It’s hard to imagine that so many people could have intentionally or not abandoned their magical ownership as to make such a career feasible.
He refers to cauldrons that “fell off the back of a broomstick”. Perhaps he meant it literally?
But no, he tells an amusing story about stealing toads from a fellow thief and selling them back to him. It’s clear that their relationship is built on selling each other things they “nicked”.
You mean, aside from Bacon’s diary?
“Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods”
This makes a lot of sense. In a society where theft from even most wizards should be theoretically pretty easy, blanket ‘anti-theft’ measures seem most workable. Which, of course, implies that ownership is an intrinsic property of matter in the wizarding verse. Ayn Rand would squee.
Alternative; HPMOR is a sometimes a sideways critique of the Rowling universe, and should, perhaps, sometimes be viewed in that light.
Rowling’s universe does have poor wizards, and it does have money and currency constraints. Gold seems to be both intrinsically valuable and rare which is strange. There do seem to be strong cultural taboos against interaction with muggles, despite the obvious benefits (gold, sex, etc.) But the origin of those taboos have never been adequately explained. Such an explanation might allow for a Voldemort who was guided by something other than a quest for personal power, but who was some matrix-esque control mechanism from Atlantis. But I don’t want to get too Deus Ex Maquina in my explanations if something better presents itself. In any case, the taboos could easily be outdated. The existence of long-lived wizards suggests a larger ratio of old people to young, and a more conservative society (as in ‘resistant to change’) in general.
Alternately perhaps Harry’s experiment regarding inheritance was wrong or inadequate in some way and magic really can be diluted by interacting/breeding with muggles. We’ve been told that the most powerful wizards tend to have few children. Grindelwald seems to have been Gay. Dumbledore is both Gay and childless/asexual in his adult life. If we assume a given number of Atlantean ‘magic markers’ (genetic markers which confer magic ability, which is what a strict Mendelian wizarding gene is likely to be ;-) ) then perhaps having a larger number of a particular marker in a population really WOULD decrease the average power of anyone else who held one of those markers. This would allow for the cultural evolution of a wizarding world that was strongly insular, since familiarity breeds children and indiscriminate genetic dispersal would lead to collapse or diminishment of that family’s wizarding powers.
Which suggests that either Neville has a lot of distant relatives somewhere, or remarkable magical potential.
I think that most people can’t do that.
Well, in canon you need to pay for food—although it’s mentioned that you can cast enlarging charms o food you already have. Aaand … that’s kinda it. Water, free. Shelter free. Furniture, free.. Transport, free. Magical artifacts, to be fair, will cost you somewhat, so entertainment, medicine (is it mentioned if St. Mungos is public healthcare?), and certain conveniences (owls, broomsticks, floo powder …) will require a least intermittent income, but I would say an unemployed wizard is still quite comfortable compared to a muggle. And most magic items will last for years or decades, judging by the Weasleys.
Maybe the goblins have established some sort of monopoly on Galleon production, and regulate the amount of it that may be produced in one year? Plausibly the wizards might support that kind of a monopoly to prevent rampant inflation and destabilization of the economy.
Even if their knowledge of economics hadn’t caught up with muggles and they were still thinking in mercantilist terms (and so didn’t properly understand the concept of inflation), they could still understand that things will remain more stable that way. There have always been monopolies on the production of the official currency, with counterfeiters being harshly punished, and the (guild-like) goblins controlling it would fit with the general “old-fashioned” nature of the wizarding world.
If the goblins allow wizards to bring in gold to be minted, as Griphook told Harry, then how would they decide what wizards to work with? Every wizard can steal an effectively unlimited amount of gold from Muggle vaults. If many wizards did so, and then the goblins refused to turn most of that gold into Galleons, this would probably act to break their monopoly as a market in gold and/or other coins naturally emerged.
Unless wizards all agree not to value raw gold at all, only Galleons. That seems implausible.
Why? There are vast advantages in using the currency that everyone else accepts. Real-world alternative currencies rarely replace the official national currencies, either. (Even if you believed that Bitcoin had the potential to eventually do so, gold and Galleons are both physical currencies, so gold wouldn’t have the advantages of a digital cryptocurrency.)
Muggles have never agreed not to value gold, even though vastly more money exists in non-gold-backed currencies today. Which is why those gold vaults still exist.
On the other hand, the main reason Muggles value gold is for jewelry, and it’s more likely that wizards use magic to substitute.
But, again, the fact is that Griphook agrees to convert gold into Galleons at only 5% overhead. So even if a wizard only values Galleons, he’ll want to acquire gold and give it to Griphook.
What if the Galleons are actually fake gold created by Goblins, and they can tell ‘fake’ currency because it’s real?
That way, only the Goblins can test for ‘real’ vs. ‘fake’ currency because the wizards all have it backwards.
Griphook says earlier in the fic that “only a fool would trust anything other than goblin stamped galleons”, or words to that effect. So maybe wizards are free to trade gold with Muggles, but raw gold is easy to fake, so nobody is interested in raw gold, and only galleons are valuable. The goblins will stamp some galleons for you for a fee, but they don’t want to hyper-inflate the economy so they only do small batches. Either its near-impossible to fake up galleons, or the threat of goblin war against counterfeiters is too scary for people to try. Or have I missed something?
I think you’re onto something. Specifically, in the books, Goblins possess magic metalworking techniques wizards don’t know how to duplicate—and they know how to detect them. (It’s a point of contention as part of the whole “give us wands” thing.)
You’re suggesting that there are two substances, difficult to tell apart, both called “gold”. On what grounds does one decide which to think of as “the real thing” and which to think of as “an imitation of the real thing”?
On the grounds that if the goblins can tell them apart, there must be some difference. Remember, something doesn’t need to have a physical use to have value—see Bitcoin, or intellectual property, or stock options. Simple scarcity is sufficient to create value if people decide to value it.
“If people decide to value it” makes that a tautology. Leaving that aside, scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. The only surviving painting by a contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci of little renown will be valued, but less than one by Leonardo.
Silver has two stable isotopes, in roughly equal proportions. I doubt there’s much monisotopically refined silver in the world. It would cost more to make it, but it wouldn’t be worth more, unless someone wanted some that badly for a practical purpose.
As phrased it’s tautological, but my point was the implication—people can choose to value whatever they want, value is not intrinsic to an item. Lack of scarcity does provide an upper cap, though—air will never be valuable on the surface of Earth—so if people have chosen to value something, then scarcity is the remaining factor needed for it to have value. (I phrased it poorly, but I think it’s still strictly correct)
Neither air nor water are scarce on Earth; but clean air and clean water have value.
Actually, some cities have featured “air stations” or “air bars” due to smog, historically. I don’t know if they still exist, I haven’t heard of a contemporary one.
But which is “real” and which is “fake”? “Real” and “fake” are not objective properties of things. If only goblins can tell the two golds apart, why would anyone care? For practical purposes, for everyone else except Harry Potter there would just be “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 1” and “gold the goblins for unknown reasons say is type 2″. Harry would be trying to find out what objective properties distinguish them.
Fake in the sense that Goblins claim that gallons are made from raw gold, when they actually aren’t.
The goblins are the central bankers of the wizarding world. They are entrusted with providing a reasonable money supply, and they’re free to use methods of their choice to create that(well, subject to assorted speciesist laws). I don’t care why the Federal Reserve says to use cotton money instead of plastic, as long as they run the money supply sufficiently well that I trust them.
I don’t believe that goblins’ magical power could outsmart that of wizards in this way. Particularly with the emphasis on wizards having access to wands and spells.
Also: why would goblins do this?
Because the goblins don’t like having real gold go out of their hands.
But then goblins would still want wizards to bring in real gold for “minting”. And wizards would still steal or trade for all the Muggle gold to give to goblins, and billions of Galleons would be circulating as a result. And we don’t observe that.
’cause it can be turned into money, so they would want it, so it would be valuable.
I suspect anyone bringing in such a large pile of gold would be immediately arrested, or at least investigated, unless they had a damn good story.
Why? The goblins take a percentage for the minting, so they want the minting to go ahead.
But does the Ministry—who are the ones with aurors—want muggles wondering why there’s so little gold nowadays? Not to mention the sudden rich people messing up the established power balance.
Again, why would the Ministry not take the gold for themselves instead of guarding it for the Muggles? Note that the explanation has to hold across all of recorded history, in many nations and times.
Why would the Ministry do that? I’m kind of drawing a blank here. Sure, the Magical government (maybe not the Ministry, since you can be fined for breaking the statute of secrecy) could probably pull it off (although it would have all sorts of repercussions.) But … I’m having a hard time imagining them doing so.
Honestly, can you imagine a Muggle government doing something like that? I mean, it’s not perfectly analogous, but I’d say your average army could fill in for magic here.
I didn’t mean the Ministry would steal Muggle gold and put it in the Ministry fund. I meant some Minister, or Head Auror, or other well-connected person, would steal it for himself (plus bribes to the guards to look the other way).
And yes, I totally believe that Muggle ministers would do that if they could, and in fact have done so many times in Muggle history.
Oh, right. Yeah, that’s a bit more plausible, I have to admit.
And yet … still very hard. Unless you’re already really really rich? I guess?
Well, maybe via war...
Nope, sometimes the government just steals everyone’s gold.
That … doesn’t seem like a great example.
It used to be that governments would debase their coinage whenever they needed money. Today, of course, we’re all taught that constant inflation is good for us.
Which, while admittedly very annoying to those poor suckers who already possess money, is rather different to launching a strike team to physically empty bank vaults.
Everyone does what they can. There have been many incidencts when Muggle governments expropriated privately owned gold (or other riches). They wouldn’t do it to themselves, of course, so the central bank vaults remained safe.
But the point is, only the arbiters of ultimate power (or their clients) can be truly rich; if anyone else is richer than they are, they will tend to take the riches by force. In the HP-verse, wizards have the ultimate power.
Except wizards don’t view themselves as the “arbiters of ultimate power” over the Muggles. Statute of Secrecy.
Now Voldemort, I admit, would probably have done something like this once he took power. Or Grindelwald. But neither of them won, so… manifestly, no wizard has successfully seized power to rule over the Muggles (except maybe waay back and it got covered up) because the SoS is still a thing.
My guess is that they actually do care, if only because they don’t want Muggles getting too suspicious.
But yes, minor rights violations probably go on; the books note that dosing a muggle you have a crush on with love potion is seen as romantic.
Serious problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production = 2700 metric tons annually produced today. If there are one million wizards in the world, it takes 1000 tons of gold to have one kilogram of gold / 200 Galleons per person (~$50K at today’s prices). Or they have to produce a ton a year for a thousand years. How much gold was in pre-industrial e.g. Aztec civilization?
That’s a good point. I also add that Wikipedia says that:
But still, if just a few wizards stole appreciable fractions of the Muggle gold vaults, they would be individually very rich. The same 1000 tons of gold would be a (ETA fixed calculation) 200 million Galleon fortune if owned by one wizard. Therefore, the question is how much gold is concentrated in one place (already mined) and available for stealing.
Wikipedia provides a list of officially reported gold holdings by country. The top few are: US, 8133 tons; Germany, 3391 tons; IMF, 2814 tons; Italy, 2451 tons; France, 2435 tons.
But where is the gold physically kept? Well, Wikipedia says that Fort Knox holds 4578 tons of gold. In any case, a wizard could Apparate to people, ask them where most of the gold is (Legilimency/Veritaserum/Imperius), Memory-Charm to erase the few minutes of the encounter, and Apparate away. If the person doesn’t know where the gold is, they can tell you who does know. Start with someone like a bank CEO, unlikely to have magical protection (unlike heads of state), and work your way on—in a day or two you’ll find the gold.
How do we know this hasn’t actually happened? The gold in the bank vaults may not be actually there. But the wizarding economy doesn’t have a known history of occasional sudden billionaires. Lucius probably never even heard about fortunes of more than a few million Galleons.
There’s another big pile of gold, about 7,000 tonnes, in the New York Fed—that’s actually where a lot of foreign countries keep a large fraction of their gold supply. It’s open to tourists and you can walk in and look at the big stacks of gold bars. It does have fairly impressive security, but that security could plausibly be defeated by a reasonably competent wizard.
More to the point, whatever security Muggle vaults had 100 or 200 years ago definitely wouldn’t have stood up to wizards. (Their powers wane by the year, while ours wax.) Since all the Muggle gold didn’t vanish long ago, there must be a different explanation than Muggle vault security.
I think that a lot of the Hogwarts Founders and Merlin stuff was actually setting things up so stuff like this wouldn’t happen.
Possibly, but why couldn’t it have happened prior? There was plenty of gold around in the ancient world, and not enough of it got stolen. Nor is enough sitting in the wizarding economy.
The statute of secrecy also didn’t exist back then.
What are the relevant implications of that? I’m not coming up with any.
Muggle society could hire wizards to punish thieves.
Wizards would know more muggles personally.
Maybe there really were fortunes made in those days, and it was covered up on our end. (Small fortunes, because muggles hadn’t had time to mine as much gold?)
Hypothesis: Aurors simply put alarm spells in large repositories of gold.
(This may not be widely known, because everyone who realises that muggles can be stolen from does so and is jailed.)
It doesn’t matter that much if some wannabe thieves get caught. Only one thief needs to succeed per vault per century to make all the Muggle gold disappear. An alarm isn’t enough against several wizards who take the time to prepare a raid. Only a round the clock guard would be enough. If Aurors guard all the big Muggle gold vaults (or that the goblins or their dragons do), that might be a sufficient deterrent.
What isn’t clear is why they would install alarms or provide guards, instead of just taking the gold themselves.
Well, if it’s an unusual idea to start with, and hard to hide—I mean, if you don’t get suddenly and suspiciously rich, what’s the point? - and most people get filtered out because their brilliant and original plan was actually anticipated (remember, the whole point of stealing from muggles is that they wont have magical protections) … I can see it being pretty much a non-starter.
Also, is that actually true? I mean, there’s only so much gold per vault, only so much time for this to have happened in, and so on. Heck, would we even still use vaults if “police baffled by fort knox raid” showed up on the news every so often, to the point that the majority of Earth’s gold was lost that way?
There’s enough gold per value to make a successful thief the richest wizard in the world. And there have been big gold vaults for many centuries, with royal treasuries preceding them. And yet there hasn’t been even one case in Muggle history of all the gold disappearing from a vault without explanation.
A thief could still succeed once. That we still use vaults indicates a thief has never succeeded. There’s still something to explain.
Funnily enough, it occurred to me that I have no idea if any such cases have occurred. I still don’t, because all the top Google hits seem to be conspiracy theories or something about how various gold reserves are totally empty. (Maybe a coverup would actually be possible with magic? Hmm … Fort Knox hasn’t been audited in 60 years, supposedly, so who knows?)
But honestly, who cares if you’re the “richest wizard in the world” if you’re in jail and your “wealth” is an unspendable stolen asset (remember, raw gold needs to be converted into coins)?
Yeah, I just meant that muggles wouldn’t actually lose all the gold. It’s a moot point, since clearly this hasn’t happened either way.
A little digging suggests less than a thousand tons. Most of the metal wealth extracted by the Spanish empire was in the form of silver, not gold. The spanish were able to mine about a ton a year from hispanola for some unknown period, and the inca paid a ransom of 24 tons for their king.
So that Hermione found a wizarding way to make money (as she was trying to do) through trade with the Muggle world, and was assasinated by this mechanism?
Trade is a bigger problem than theft.
It’s (relatively) easy to handwave into being prohibitions on theft—pretty much every society dislikes it and you can posit both morality and anti-theft magics as making outright thieving to be not too useful for wizards.
On the other hand trade is generally seen as good and there are huge and obvious benefits to trade between Muggles and wizards. Especially given how easy it would be for less scrupulous wizards to make sure the terms of trade are very very beneficial to them (and yet do not descend into outright theft).
I’m not sure the problem is solvable without introducing major new mechanisms of how the world works.
Many, many post-agricultural societies have restrained trade, often to particular privileged individuals. I believe this is what a ‘patent’ used to be.
Yes, but notice what this implies. This implies that trade is such an awesome value-producing mechanism that we (=elites with political power) want to keep it for ourselves and our friends.
The idea is not to forbid trade, the idea is to restrict access and thus collect what the econospeak calls rents. Everyone wants to be a gatekeeper at a fountain of gold.
This usually requires that the person holding the patent provide enough trade to satisfy demand. Otherwise the pressure to create a black market is irresistible. So trade could be restricted to a few powerful wizards—perhaps to each wizarding government—but it could not be eliminated entirely.
And since wizards can provide extremely valuable services to Muggles in trade, they would capture almost all the Muggle gold in return. Then we would observe wizarding billionaires, making fortunes of a 100,000 Galleons negligible in comparison. That we don’t observe this is strong evidence that trade either doesn’t exist at all or is universal and unrestricted. Since the story offers ample proof that trade isn’t universal, it must be nonexistent. But it’s not clear what is preventing trade.
Wizarding culture. Trade with muggles was basically worthless until a single wizard’s lifetime ago, so the prejudice hasn’t had time to evolve away yet.
I recall reading that somewhere (maybe Pottermore?), Rowling said that the Malfoys gained their great family wealth by trade with muggles, until the establishment of the statute of secrecy, at which point they were quick to join the “Yep, we knew those dirty muggles just wanted to exploit and burn us all along!” crowd. I don’t remember if there is any similar detail about other wealthy families in canon or MoR; there’s Flamel with the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Potters with a combination family inheritance/bounty on Voldemort, but the Malfoys appear to be decidedly the richest family in Magical Britain, and I’d imagine that even with a 400 year gap, being those to most thoroughly exploit trade with muggles would be more than sufficient to explain their success.
Muggles had a lot of gold a hundred years ago, too. Certainly if you count in terms of just a few wizards taking possession of it. And it was easier to find because currencies were gold-backed.
If they were unwilling to just steal it (for whatever reason), then spending a few weeks performing services for the richest people in the world in exchange for half their wealth (amounting to many millions of Galleons) would have been a great bargain for wizards.
The mutual benefits of trade are non-obvious to humans, and many cultures have seen merchants as low-status because of a naive notion that they don’t contribute anything.
In most societies, there was no remotely adequate solution to the problems of tracking reputations and punishing violations of trust for merchants who operated outside the narrow circle of their own communities. So merchants were largely viewed as scammers because they mostly were; nothing naive about it.
Second thought: of course dishonest merchants exist, but it’s also true that merchants upset static status arrangements like controlling land being the only important thing.
Evidence that merchants were mostly scammers?
I would think that most merchants were working territories and dealing with the same people repeatedly, but I’m guessing, too.
I don’t think this is historically true. Humans actively traded since paleolithic times (there are archeological finds like amber far away inland or stone tools made out of stone that does not occur anywhere locally).
Merchants were typically seen as of lower status than the nobles and the military (for rather obvious reasons), but of higher status than craftsmen and peasants.
I don’t think that was intrinsic to being a merchant, just a consequence of (some of them) being richer.
I think even simpler than this is the fact that the wizards don’t have anything of worth to trade to the Muggles, since non-magical people have a hard time even seeing magical artifacts, much less using them.
Muggles have plenty of things that would be useful to Wizards, but the reverse isn’t true.
Wizards have plenty to trade to Muggles—by providing services, not products.
Magical cures to deadly diseases and accidents. A replicable cure can’t be traded, but wizards can individually cure powerful and wealthy people. (Harry speculates that wizards would probably cure cancer in members of the Muggle government.)
Military and covert operations, assassinations, coups, revolutions, etc. Apparate in, kill the enemy government and generals, win the war. Toppling any regime in the world that hasn’t purchased magical protection of its own would give you a lot of money. In fact, every wizarding community should be able to demand arbitrary amounts of protection money from its local Muggles.
Theft and spying (industrial and government).
Subversion and interrogation of enemy leaders (by Legilimency, Veritaserum, Imperius.)
Creation of single-action devices via Transmutation (like some of the things Harry tried in his experiments). Muggles can then study, analyze, experiment on, or copy the Transmuted devices while they last.
Transportation. Launch satellites by Apparating into orbit! Rescue trapped people!
A wizard could easily play a Muggle Superman—flying, being invincible, combatting crime...
Great list. Upvoted.
I think that actually failed …
Well, it’s not clear why it failed exactly. It might have been because it never existed before, but it seems more likely to me that it was because Harry didn’t know what it was exactly. He didn’t try to transmute “this molecular structure I have in my mind”, he tried to transmute “a substance I know nothing about except that it cures Alzheimer’s”. That was probably not specific enough for the spell. (Otherwise, why not transmute a black-box device with a big red “kill Voldemort where-ever he is” button, or a mysterious “bring a dead body back to life” device?)
In any case there are things who physical properties we know, and which exist or have existed, but would be very valuable to create in laboratories. Like creating a string of DNA to order, which can then replicate itself into ordinary non-transmuted matter—very valuable in 1993!
Yeah, Harry discovered that you can’t transmute something that hasn’t already been created through more conventional means.
Nothing of worth? The canon explanation for the Wizarding world’s masquerade, from just a few chapters into the series, is that wizards would be in such demand by muggles that it would be too irritating and waste too much time.
Magical goods maybe, magical services certainly not. There are many things that magic could do to add value to non-magical objects, which then do not require any further magic to sustain (see Harry and Hermione’s discussion about helping to manufacture nanotechnology and/or Alzheimer’s cures).
That’s true. Everyone’s talking so much about stealing gold and magical artifacts that I didn’t think of magical services.
There’s a long history of witch hunts inquisitions etc. a taboo on wizard muggle interactions makes sense and is consistent with history. It’s also has the merit of requiring fewer other pieces to be set up for it to work as an explanation.
Yet, this doesn’t stop them from intermarrying on a regular basis.
Well, but that’s true love. You can’t stop that!
Wait, are we applying narrative logic here or real logic?
that...said...it didn’t do them much good whenver they caught a real witch/wizard, they’d just freeze the flames and scream to keep up with the act
One witch deliberately got herself caught repeatedly (14 times?) because she liked the tingling.
Yeah. it’s cannon.
This is a huge problem with HP, and pretty much all urban fantasy; and most especially ones that posit an entire separate magical society. There are just too many plot devices like the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy needed to keep the story world looking anything like the real world does.
The point about lawyers is just that Harry sees the wizard world as rather quaint and old-fashioned; Lucius is a big frog in a very tiny pond. Let the Masquerade be broken in any serious way, and within a year or two Muggle Britain will have produced anti-curse body armour (possibly made of tinfoil) and guns that will reliably break a wizard’s shields. In other words, it’s not just wizard lawyers that are cute; wizard soldiers are also fundamentally non-serious. This may not be actually true, but I think it is what Harry believes.
By the way, in the Rowling-verse, the Prime Minister is supposed to know about the Ministry of Magic; he’s the one official point of contact between Muggles and wizards. I wonder if that’s also true in the canonical version?
Did you just upgrade HPMoR to canon, and downgrade the Rowling-verse to non-canon? Bwa-ha-ha!
I’ve done that with Luminosity and Radiance over the four Twilight books (and I’ve only read the latter because of the former), and will probably do that with MoR once it’s actually complete.
For purposes of HP:MoR, yes. Canon is relative.
It’s not body armor and such that matters. It’s control. Wizards have mind magic. They can alter memories and control people. That would let them act through agents who already possess muggle resources, and who already understand (and can explain whenever necessary) the strengths of the muggle world.
At the end of the day, if wizards seriously get interested in the muggle world, and muggles in the wizard world (not that they should get the chance, if the Malfoys are smart), and both learn about each others’ strengths, wizards will still be the ones with the edge.
Hence my mention of anti-curse body armour made of tinfoil. :)
Body armor only protects against weak curses like Somnium that are standard first year hexes. Stupefy, which is castable by first years, is not blocked by armor.
I think you are rather missing my point, here. The body armour that Muggle Britain would invent would not be the kind available to Harry as a desperate improvisation. In a year or two, after a crash research program, Muggle Britain would understand how magic works, what materials block it, and would mass-produce the resulting body armour that does block curses up to and including Avada Kedavra. It would be based on tinfoil because everyone knows that tinfoil hats block the government’s mind-controlling rays.
Why would a gun be more lethal than current combat magic?
1) Same reason muskets trump trained knights and longbowmen. Even though heavy plate was actually effective against primitive firearms, and longbows worked more reliably and with excellent range, you could kit out a peasant with an arquebus for much less than the cost of mounting and armoring a knight, and a fraction of the training (you had to train for years to be able to fight effectively in mail or on horseback and drawing a longbow was an elite skill that required extreme muscle hypertrophy. It took a few hours to learn how to operate your firearm, and a few weeks to learn how to coordinate with other peasants.) Similarly, even if wizards were significantly more lethal and/or survivable than dudes with carbines, they’d be incredibly outnumbered.
2) In the Harry Potter World, combat magic is really weak. It’s almost all short range and slow, often nonlethal, rarely provides area effects, and nobody really trains it. Automatic weapons have cyclic rates of hundreds or even thousands of rounds per minute, and trained operators can hit a target at half a mile or more. And that’s just small arms. They wouldn’t even need special anti-magic weapons, unless the wizards were extremely well organized.
With regards to (2), I think you’re confusing first-year war games with actual combat magic.
Actual “I really want to kill you” spells are probably much more powerful. Fiendfyre for example has at least the destructive potential of a tank, and in canon even Goyle could cast it. (It’s hard to control, but then again so is a tank.) Avada Kedavra can probably kill you even through a nuclear bunker wall, and it can be used by at least some teenagers. Sectumsempra is probably a instant-kill against a muggle, even with body armor, and it was invented by Snape while he was still a student.
By contrast, pretty much the most powerful potential weapon normal people (well, outside the US at least) have ready access to is a car, and a very tiny fraction of people can easily make something much more destructive than a crude bomb. Also, due to the effects of magic on electronics, pretty much everything other than kinetic impactors would be fried by any kind of spell that manages to connect.
We’re never shown really bad stuff, and during a discussion in MoR it’s mentioned that thermonuclear weapons are only a bit worse than most really bad spells, and that Atlantis was erased from time.
Good points, all. Fiendfyre seems robust.
I might counter that most combat magic, even the adult sort, seems to be line-of-sight, which is a huge handicap. It also seems to be very inaccurate. If Harry & Co can literally dodge Deatheaters on foot and brooms, supersonic jets and HALO insertions are going to be really hard to target. Not to mention artillery shells in flight. And Wizards seem weirdly resistant to (biased against?) using magical heavy weapons or fire team tactics. They have a real duelist mentality.
But the ability to erase from time does really trump. I concede.
A couple more recent thoughts:
Dodging Deatheaters (at least competent ones) on a broom is not something I expect to happen in MoR. Well, not unless it’s rocket powered, and I wouldn’t expect that to work more than once either.
Most of the big, non-line-of-sight weapons we (muggles) have arose for the purpose of killing lots of people in big battles (even though we’re using them of other stuff now), which isn’t really useful for wizards due to their low numbers, but:
The Interdict of Merlin is MoR-specific, and at the beginning of the Ministry chapters it is specifically mentioned that the purpose of that was to prevent what appeared to be the wizard equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. So in while magic can probably get really bad, you’re probably right that living wizards in MoR don’t know anymore extremely destructive non-line-of-sight spells, or at least they’re very rare. (Though that doesn’t mean that they aren’t much more powerful than handguns. I expect almost every spell thrown in that Quirrell–auror duel was above “high caliber machine gun” in deadliness, were it not for the shields.)
I grant 1), of course. But wizards have shields that ought to be proof against handguns. My question was asked in response to the line “guns that will reliably break a wizard’s shields”.
‘ought to’ is often not the some as ‘do’ especially when the subject is Wizarding Britain.
Wizards aren’t totally stupid. You shoot down a dozen or so, and the rest will remember their Bullet-Repelling Charms quickly enough.
Well, first you have to ask whether wizard shields actually do prevent inert lumps of lead from hitting their caster. They seem well-optimised for stopping charms, but presumably that relies on the magic in the charms, opposed by the magic in the shields. No doubt a wizard can shield against firearms, but do they as a matter of routine?
Second, because Muggle Britain has thousands of scientists who would like nothing better than to crack the Secret Of Magic and, incidentally, mass-produce magic bullets each with the force of a low-level anti-shield charm. Which you can then fire from machine guns wielded by conscripts with two weeks’ training.
Almost certainly they do. Minerva mentions that guns aren’t a big threat to a prepared witch, and even if you assume she’s not really knowledgeable, I’m pretty sure someone would have tried throwing (with magic) hard, heavy things at their opponent during life-and-death fights. Or at least using bows and arrows.
I wouldn’t say that they aren’t dangerous, but I agree that they’re unserious. Harry is one of an apparently very limited number who takes wizarding power seriously enough to learn how it works, and really think creatively about how it can be leveraged.