ETA: Didn’t remember the bizarre conclusions that discussion reached, though. Is there any indication that Eliezer thought about the sociological angle before writing this? He might have made an honest mistake about the population.
Or the population might actually be much larger, Hogwarts might not be the only magical school, and the story just hasn’t gotten around to telling us yet.
It seems likely that Eliezer noticed this early and possible that he kept it in mind while writing and editing later chapters. I noticed after that discussion (though maybe this is just confirmation bias on my part?) subsequent chapters started having a bit more social background that systematically favored “moderately big Magical Britain” (closer to 70,000 than 3000) and more political detail that seemed to me “more realistic” for the suggested scale.
There were a lot of slightly recurring cameos by people who made fan art, for example, so that you get more of a sense that the writing works a bit like the Simpsons with a relatively gigantic cast and a more available whenever the plot requires. And then there was subtle but direct stuff like the digression into the daily lives of Auror’s guarding Azkaban with discussion of their alienation, working for triple pay (why official “triple pay”? why so formal? are their wizard labor unions?), and their silent culture of tolerated bribery. It smells to me like a small department within a much larger bureaucracy, or a platoon in an army, where people in the trenches together are reasonably OK pragmatically optimizing for mutual local benefit at the expense of the more sweeping institutions.
Isn’t a 70k population still too tiny to support the MoR-verse’s level of social complexity?
I don’t think so. I think 70K population is more than sufficient for what we observe. After all, the primary servant-class (House-Elves) isn’t included in that number. The primary banking/financial class and atleast some portion of the manufacturing class is goblins, which is also not included in that number. Anything that concerns the gathering of raw non-magical material (Farming/mining/etc) can be gotten by trading with (or thieving from) the muggles.
The rest: nobility, ministry employees, aurors, shopkeepers, athletes—I think they can fit in easily in a population of some dozens thousands. Possibly even less.
Yeah, that’s the one.
ETA: Didn’t remember the bizarre conclusions that discussion reached, though. Is there any indication that Eliezer thought about the sociological angle before writing this? He might have made an honest mistake about the population.
Or the population might actually be much larger, Hogwarts might not be the only magical school, and the story just hasn’t gotten around to telling us yet.
It seems likely that Eliezer noticed this early and possible that he kept it in mind while writing and editing later chapters. I noticed after that discussion (though maybe this is just confirmation bias on my part?) subsequent chapters started having a bit more social background that systematically favored “moderately big Magical Britain” (closer to 70,000 than 3000) and more political detail that seemed to me “more realistic” for the suggested scale.
There were a lot of slightly recurring cameos by people who made fan art, for example, so that you get more of a sense that the writing works a bit like the Simpsons with a relatively gigantic cast and a more available whenever the plot requires. And then there was subtle but direct stuff like the digression into the daily lives of Auror’s guarding Azkaban with discussion of their alienation, working for triple pay (why official “triple pay”? why so formal? are their wizard labor unions?), and their silent culture of tolerated bribery. It smells to me like a small department within a much larger bureaucracy, or a platoon in an army, where people in the trenches together are reasonably OK pragmatically optimizing for mutual local benefit at the expense of the more sweeping institutions.
Also, apparently there are other schools in MoR!Britain.
Isn’t a 70k population still too tiny to support the MoR-verse’s level of social complexity?
I don’t think so. I think 70K population is more than sufficient for what we observe. After all, the primary servant-class (House-Elves) isn’t included in that number. The primary banking/financial class and atleast some portion of the manufacturing class is goblins, which is also not included in that number. Anything that concerns the gathering of raw non-magical material (Farming/mining/etc) can be gotten by trading with (or thieving from) the muggles.
The rest: nobility, ministry employees, aurors, shopkeepers, athletes—I think they can fit in easily in a population of some dozens thousands. Possibly even less.