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.
Times article reports (yes, when not reporting on politics the Times is usually great), “The strategy did not immediately ignite enthusiasm among the more than 100 financial analysts who follow the company. Microsoft’s stock fell 73 cents Thursday, or 2.38 percent, to $29.98.”
