I finally obtained, and read, the last of the Harry Potterbooks
(no spoilers)
I did wander over to the old (spoilered filled) discussion at that haven of F/SF - Making Light, which was good fun, but one comment caught my eye in the endless discussion of matching up the wizard population to the size of Hogwarts class.
"What kind of society needs one school, one bank, one Ministry and 13 professional Quidditch teams?"
I know! The Færeyjar! - Faroe Islands
They have 50,000 people, fairly spread out in small villages.
Far as I know, they still have one bank (Landsbanki, natch), ok they seem to have three high schools now, but these are islands...
There is definitely just one Ministry, reporting to the King and Parliament in Denmark, but there are TEN premier league soccer teams, and a similar size first division with two teams relegated/promoted each season.
This suggests ~ 20-50,000 wizards would be a reasonable population for the British Isles in the Potterverse. Also explain why they all knew each other at some level.
If we figure they are relatively long lived (magical medicine vs high crime rate), you get ~ 2-500 kids per year. If not all go to Hogwarts, then class sizes of ~ 100 per year are broadly consistent. Some go abroad, some are home schooled.
Doesn't quite add up, but this is fiction.
And at least the absurd level of the Quidditch infrastructure is in fact consistent with reality.
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And everybody likes sports - and the wizards seem to disdain everything except quidditch, so it's not that odd, really. Besides, weren't some of those teams from Europe? And there were two other schools in the tri-wizard competition.
One of my friends sent me this link to an actual HP econ paper. Don't know if it's total bunk on the econ side, but there are plenty of misspellings :)
http://www.economics.emory.edu/Working_Papers/wp/levy_05_28_paper.pdf
Keep in mind that one difference between magical and nonmagical worlds of the Potter books is that, in the magical world, distance is not necessarily a factor. The two most common methods of transportation are the floo network and apparition. So one bank could conceivably be sufficient.
Also, there is never any mention that the Ministry of Magic has jurisdiction outside of Great Britain.
As another poster said, there are at least two other schools of witchcraft mentioned in the books. It's also mentioned in one of the books (I can't remember which one) that not all U.K. witches and wizards attend Hogwarts; many families choose to educate their children at home.
All of the above are part of the careful consistency that has always impressed me about the Potter books.
I think a single bank and ministry work fine - the school issue is marginal, because while clearly there is homeschooling of wizards (since there is no school at all before age 11, why suddenly board at age 11), but it is hard to believe say < 1% of wizard children go to Hogwarts (and the other schools are foreign as I recall, so some but not most brit wizard kids might go there)
But clearly there could be several times more wizard kids than show at Hogwarts
BUT, how can this small a society sustain 13 Quidditch teams just in England (or possibly Britain) - the league is local, not transnational.
Well, if the Faeroe's can sustain 10 premier league soccer teams, and a first division of comparable size, we have existence proof.
That was what seemed hard.
The Quidditch numbers aren't at all hard to understand in the U.S. Look how many baseball teams we have, between major and minor leagues. Plus all the football teams (half a dozen states have two or more), all the basketball teams...
Hey, wait, that does raise an interesting point, now I think about it. Quidditch teams don't really seem to be geographically based, do they? If I understand football/soccer in the rest of the world, it's all professional club teams until World Cup years, and World Cup teams representing nations are drawn from the club teams -- do I have that right?
Uh, no. Not everybody.
I remember hearing about a woman whose job it is to read the Harry Potter manuscripts and movie scripts for consistency. A really smart woman with a very good memory. In particular, the last book is saturated with references to all the previous books.
If I had Rowling's resources and deadline, I'd do the same...
Constance: the Quidditch league is clearly a parody of the English Football (soccer) League. The teams are geographically based, although the players may come from anywhere (many teams still have some resemblance of training camps to raise local talent but often trade them immediately when they reach 16). Nowadays the EU is a free labour zone, so a local team player may be from anywhere in Europe. Players from outside Europe need work permit visas, which almost boils down to "being on the national team".
The national teams, as would play in the World Cup, are drawn from the best of the individual players in the league.
A professional team would pay its players, not necessarily enough to actually live on, but it'd be their "job" to play, they might have other jobs (anything from bartender to model...)
The density of teams implies is about one per 3-5,000 people, which is very high.
The US does not have that level of professional sports teams, I think mainly because none of the major sports run divided leagues with promotion and relegation for teams.
I was amused to see the Faroe football teams to hit that density though, with similar economics - single "industry", sparse village clumped population etc.
Ridger is right, everybody loves sports...look at alabama, they sent 80,000 people to a spring practice game of their football team...that's alot of folks.