The invisible wand
Posted by Ron Coleman on July 21, 2007
Megan McArdle asks the questions that many of us — especially the economics majors among us — have been nursing for years:
The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? Anything they need, except scarce magical objects, can be obtained by ordering a house elf to do it, or casting a spell, or, in a pinch, making objects like dinner, or a house, assemble themselves. Yet the Weasleys are poor not just by wizard standards, but by ours: they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?The answer, as with so much of JK Rowling’s work, seems to be “she didn’t think it through”. . . .
To the extent that there is any system at all, it is the meanest sort of Victoriana, the fantasy world of a child Herbert Spencer. There is a hereditary aristocracy of talent, and I am secretly at its apex. There is an elite school almost nobody can go to, and I am one of the chosen. People fall quite neatly into the categories of good, bad, or clueless, we are the good ones who get to run things in the end. That’s powerful fantasy stuff, which is why it’s so common.
But the best children’s fantasy does something else: it gives one the illusion that the magical world is as consistent and real as one’s own world - that it exists, just barely out of reach. Even at eight, or 11, I could not have believed that of Harry Potter. The arbitrary ham fist of Ms Rowling is everywhere too evident - changing the rules, and then making the characters tap dance, like marionettes, to distract you from the enormous potholes in the plot.
(Via IP.) She’s right about this. And yet I do not think that this distracts from Rowling’s remarkable accomplishment — not only economic (but yeah, that too! yeah, remarkable!). Yes, there are holes in the plots, illogic, though to some extent these are questions you can always ask about “magic powers” fantasies. Why couldn’t Jeannie from “I Dream of Jeannie” or Samantha of “Bewitched” just solve problems they created with their magic by using magic in a more direct way than the half-hour plots allowed? These questions have been pondered in the social science departments of all the great insitutions of higher learning.
But at the end of the day, which is where we are, Rowling did create a very compelling alternate universe, even if lacking in the desired degree of internal consistency, and characters that children and many adults did manage to care about.
And, yeah, she made a boatload of money. There must be some magic to that.
UPDATE: In the comments at Megan’s article — similarly bewitched thoughts.
July 22, 2007 at 6:58 pm
[...] The invisible wand Megan McArdle asks the questions that many of us — especially the economics majors among us — have been […] [...]
July 24, 2007 at 1:40 am
Well, Ron, it’s obvious that both you and Ms. McArdle have little experience with the greater body of fantasy work out there.
To mention just one small example: common spellcasters might not be able to create or replicate spellbooks for several reasons. One might be that there is a defensive spell cast on the book which defends against replication; it might manifest itself in the same way that Hermione hexed the traitor who finked out Dumbledore’s Army in book 5.
Another method would involve a self-imposed geas invoked when purchasing the book, which would prevent the buyer from creating a copy. Naturally the geas would include clauses preventing a friend who “borrows” the book from making copies as well.
Finally there’s Terry Pratchett’s ideas about magik, which are deeply linked to modern physics. For example, in Discworld, magik-users recognize it is incredibly difficult to create something (such as a book) out of nothing when one considers the potential energy required to create even a small object. It’s e=mc2 with a vengance. A classic example is farie (or lepruchan) gold. It’s easy to create, but does not last. In other words, the spell subtitutes entropy for energy. A gold coin may be created, but only until the next sunrise. To make a real coin out of genuine gold requires a master magician and resources at least equal in expense to the gold coin itself. Creating gold by magik is, hence, inherently uneconomical.
If Ms. McArdle had bothered to consult Europe’s fables for (oh…
the past millenium, she might have caught that concept…
July 25, 2007 at 10:56 am
Middle Earth is a very magical place. You read the books and you certainly get the view that magic suffuses the world and the culture, but there’s actually very little onstage magic. Gandalf is a wizard, but he fights with a sword; he doesn’t perform incantations or pull down lightning from the sky. Most of the magic, when it does occur, is of great import, but he never really gives wiring diagrams as to how it works. - George R. R. Martin
September 24, 2007 at 6:46 pm
[...] by Ron Coleman on September 24th, 2007 I’ve already commented on the wizarding economy and put forth my review of the last Harry Potter book. I recently enunciated, in my own head, [...]