Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.
Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..
Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were wizards.
And yet, when they mention a price of 100,000 galleons people are shocked. The reaction does not look like it’s 1/15th of a week’s worth of effort he’s got to worry about. Dumbledore views it as a major problem that Harry is 60,000 galleons in debt. We know from chapter 70 that it’s a known thing that witches and wizards will trick a muggle with a love potion and rape them. Yet nobody thinks to slip Bill Gates a love potion, convince him to part with $2 billion, and blow Lucius out of the water with 100 million galleons. And these are among the most financially motivated people in all of wizardry, not the common population, who consider 2 million pounds as more than weekend spending money. I notice I am confused.
I’ll brainstorm some possible explanations:
Gringotts won’t mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.
Gold isn’t available to purchase with muggle money: Wizards could own the gold exchanges and gold mines. They do nominal trading for electronics and jewelry, but the vast share of gold goes to the wizarding world. Possible, but it would drastically change the face of the real world (eg World Reserves would be a lie, and Ron Paul is a wizard).
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is way more effective than I imagine: They can find and intervene in not only all cases of magic misuse (eg imperius or bank robberies), but check other means like love potions. Seems unlikely, considering the current crime investigation and how the last war went. Result—Arbitrage and stock/lottery manipulation work.
The wizarding world is full of complete inverse-omega class idiots: Always a good theory. But it doesn’t sound right for the entirety of the wizarding world (including a ton of muggle-born) to act so completely stupid.
The financial tycoons on Wizengamot actually do this: Maybe most of the Wizengamot fortunes exist due to questionable sources. That would explain the majority of evil people doing the voting. Still, that doesn’t explain the reaction to the 100,000 galleons.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This… actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn’t a great job market for muggle-born.
Something doesn’t add up. The Wizengamot is full of bright, ambitious people, most of whom have dedicated their lives to finance (makes 4 unlikely). If they’re arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they’ve already figured out arbitrage. They wouldn’t worry about importing ink, if they weren’t leveraging different prices between the market where they’re purchasing ink and the market where they’re selling ink. Something as simple as triangle arbitrage should be figured out immediately. If wizards already discovered arbitrage, but they don’t try and arbitrage in the muggle markets directly, it would be evidence that 1 or 2 is in play. 3 and 5 are already unlikely, so I guess 1&2 or 6 make sense.
I’d be interested to see if Harry actually manages to make infinite money, and if so what it means about the world.
I think that taking advantage of muggles in lots of ways is against the law, so imperiusing or memory charming a billionaire would be forbidden. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people have thought of and maybe tried using time turners to cheat the muggle lottery, so I’d give fair odds that’s illegal too. When it comes to arbitrage though, remember that while wizards in general may not be tremendously stupid, they tend to be incredibly clueless about the muggle world; remember that Arthur Weasley can pass as a premier expert on muggle artifacts. The fact that the values of gold and silver in the muggle world are totally divorced from their value in the wizarding world is likely to be very little known, and the concept of arbitrage may be completely foreign to them as well (look how primitive their whole financial system appears to be.)
The fact that Mr. Bester, Harry’s occlumency instructor, said he wished he could remember “That trick with the gold and silver” implies that a) the idea is not obvious to most wizards, and b) he thinks he would at least stand a chance of getting away with it.
I completely agree. Recall also Draco’s speech about muggles scratching in the dirt, and his reaction to Harry’s estimate of the lunar program budget. It’s not just wizards not paying attention to relative values of gold and silver in the muggle world—for the most part, the possibility that there could be a substantial amount of either in the muggle world doesn’t occur to them. Now you might expect muggleborns to know better, even after making allowances for the fact that they enter the wizarding world at age 11. On the other hand, if a muggleborn is clever enough to see the potential for profit, they might also be clever enough to see what Harry apparently does not—that calling attention to the fact that the muggles are ripe for exploitation is a Bad Idea.
I would actually suspect parents of a half blood (is there a name for this?) would be the weak link, rather than muggle-born children.
You’ve got people who have lived their whole lives as muggles, then suddenly they fall in love and get married and find out their spouse is a wizard. They’ve spent ~20 years in the muggle world and probably have a career of their own. No way they don’t ask their spouse to spend a couple hours and let them both live like kings for the rest of their lives. And if they don’t even get that much information about their other’s life, that’s some seriously messed up power dynamics in that household.
I’m thinking more “Go magic that banker and we’ll be rich.”
Or “Hey can you use that wicker spinmaster thingy to get us the lotto numbers?” I presume if the witch/wizard owned one they’d figure out what it does eventually. They’d have to after a long enough time living together.
Also, as Harry himself speculates, muggleborns, like his mother, probably tend to fall into the habit of not thinking of muggles as Real People anymore, because it’s too emotionally taxing, and they’re living in a different world. They may stop concerning themselves with the muggle world much by the time they’re grown up. The muggle raised wizards in the original canon certainly seemed to.
All good points, but I don’t think Harry is planning on “calling atttention to the fact that the muggles are ripe for exploitation”. He’s presumably planning to make the money without anyone except one or two adults he needs for transportation/permission/whatever knowing how he did it.
Oh, I’m sure taking advantage of muggles is treated even worse than taking advantage of pets. But there are a lot of rich people and a lot of ways to steal their money. Ditto with the lottery. Maybe they police the lottery, but do they police stock exchanges, leveraged currency trading, futures markets, prediction accounts, sports betting, Vegas, etc.? It takes ten minutes to think of a dozen ways to get effectively infinite muggle money with magic.
There’s no way to stop it all. Hence, the block (if it exists) has to be at the interface point. Somewhere in between when muggle money turns into galleons.
My guess is that rather than policing any of various muggle institutions, they investigate, as we do in our own world, whenever anyone appears to suddenly come into possession of large amounts of money for no clear reason, and if they find out they did something illegal, they throw them in jail.
Maybe people are already using wizardry to get huge amounts of money through the muggle world, but if so they may have to store and use the money very inconspicuously.
I wonder if they do. The wizarding world is a bizarre mix of modern and ancient traditions. It seems just as likely for them to have an income tax as not. So, they may or may not have the bureaucratic apparatus in place to know how much money people have and make.
I also wonder what the official stance would be on, say, bilking the stock market. It seems like standing up for muggle rights would be an unpopular political stance. Since there’s no direct victim and you’re doing things that aren’t even illegal in the muggle world (nevermind they don’t have time-travel), it seems unlikely the authorities would care to stop you, unless they have a blanket ban on anything that would result in inflation.
God, I’m such a double-nerd. There’s a dark lord to be fought and I’m hoping the next plot arc is about wizard tax law and how magical Britain handles inflation.
The funny thing is, it’s not really bilking the stock market. The whole argument for stock trading is that traders create value by accurately pricing securities, and thus allocating capital efficiently. Time travel is just a ridiculously efficient means of doing so. Given common access to Time-Turners, the stock market would literally be perfectly efficient(assuming that using turner-induced stock prices doesn’t violate the 6-hour rule). People without them would be very pissed off, but I’d actually argue it as being the right and proper way to run a stock market if the technology existed.
The only thing is, once you have enough time turners to control most of the volume of the market, there are no longer any linear-time causal inputs (read: people) deciding what directions the market will take. Market fluctuations would literally come from nowhere, though it might be best said that they would come from Time. And given Harry’s previous scary experiment (DO NOT MESS WITH TIME, ch. 17), I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to let Time be the one to control this.
I also wonder what the official stance would be on, say, bilking the stock market. It seems like standing up for muggle rights would be an unpopular political stance. Since there’s no direct victim
Bolded word is redundant. This is a service being provided and nobody is having wealth that they have ‘rights’ to taken away. This is different in nature to using using time travel or to win at cards or roulette.
The muggles end up better off than they were AND Harry is better off. Almost as though it is a trade.
This is by far the likeliest explanation I’ve seen. It does lead one to wonder how many wizards are sitting on huge piles of muggle money and slowly converting it into galleons as needed.
In canon there is a Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office, but it’s not terribly competent.
However, the Minister of Magic also liaises with the Muggle Prime Minister; and presumably there is some exchange of information between their staffs. Any financial irregularities large enough to register on a national level could register that way.
In canon at least, it’s pretty clear that there is few interaction from Muggle Prime Minister and Minister of Magic, unless exceptional events occur. IIRC, in first 5 years, there is only two interactions : the Minister of Magic informing the Prime Minister about the escape of Sirius Black, and the dragons for the Triwizards Tournament. And there seems that not once did the Muggle Prime Minister directly contact the Minister of Magic, it only went the other way around.
So I’m sceptical about that. More likely the Ministry of Magic has someone working in the staff of the Muggle Prime Minister and informing the Ministry if something odds is happening.
My guess is that rather than policing any of various muggle institutions, they investigate, as we do in our own world, whenever anyone appears to suddenly come into possession of large amounts of money for no clear reason, and if they find out they did something illegal, they throw them in jail.
This would require a wizarding equivalent of the IRS, which I’ve never heard of. I’ve never seen mention of taxes, but they obviously have to pay the ministry employees something. One of the consequences of their primitive monetary system is that it is very easy to obtain money without the government knowing it. Perhaps they could use muggle taxes to buy gold to be minted into galleons, and pay employees that way. In cannon, the prime minister knows about the wizarding world, and it’s possible that information of it is just highly classified.
I suppose money could be magically tracked, but there would still need to be a ministry department. And if that is possible, it easily defeats most money-making strategies.
If any money tracking is going on, I suspect it’s done by the goblins, who I believe canonically have means of magically tracking things.
You don’t need to magically track money though, to keep record of how much money is in people’s bank accounts, and take notice if someone who’s not supposed to have lots of money suddenly starts making a lot of very expensive purchases.
You don’t need to magically track money though, to keep record of how much money is in people’s bank accounts, and take notice if someone who’s not supposed to have lots of money suddenly starts making a lot of very expensive purchases.
If you don’t put it in a bank account, then assuming no magical tracking, you could spend lots of money so long as you don’t reach a point where anyone starts asking “Hey, where did you get all this expensive stuff?”
Since the wizarding world has so much smaller a population than ours and seems to be quite class stratified, it’s quite conceivable that every person who’s supposed to be really wealthy is already known and identifiable, and any Joe Shmoe who tries making a thousand galleon purchase is instantly flagged as suspicious.
There’s another motivation for secrecy. Anyone who makes money off the Muggle world benefits from being the only one making money off the Muggle world. If they’re making lots of money, they don’t want other people to start thinking about how.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market.
Neither of which are known to the Wizarding world, as evidenced by the Occlumency teacher’s reaction to his discovery of it. (and his discovery of it, and his discovery of it… :) )
Something doesn’t add up.
Your assessment of the Wizarding World’s evaluation of the Muggle world. To the supermajority of Wizards, science is a total unknown. Economic and sociopolitical theory are terms they’ve simply never heard of.
They are isolated and effectively are like the apocryphal Chinese Emperor who burned his fleets because there was nothing left to discover; or the equally apocryphal Patent Office official who wanted to close the Patent Office in the 1800′s because there was nothing left to invent.
So basically what you’re seeing is what’s called “hindsight bias”. It is obvious to you, who knows what “Muggles” have, that the Wizards are vastly disadvantaged here—insanely so—but remember that as further demonstrated by Draco’s total ignorance of Man’s visit to the Moon, Wizards believe Muggles are “wallowing in the mud”. The idea that they might LEARN from Muggles is actively suppressed by a concerted political campain by a powerful and long-standing major political faction.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This… actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn’t a great job market for muggle-born.
Like going off to live in a poor country if you have a first-world income to live on. I believe it’s already been remarked that this is about how magical Britain views muggle Britain.
Bester has only thought about it for a few seconds so there could be problems that would occur to someone who is knowledgeable about the wizarding economy if they thought about it for a bit.
I meant it as Bayesian evidence. (updating P(Arbitrage works) down on Bester regretting means updating up on him not Regretting)
Plus, this is stronger evidence for us than for Harry due to Conservation of Details and the recent disclaimer by EY that there are no red herrings, and that simple solutions != bad solutions (and in fact, the opposite is usually true).
ETA: Also, Bester probably thought about it more more than a few seconds, at least the first time he saw it in Harry’s mind—Remember that he didn’t just see those Ideas/secrets, he’s also seen key moments of his previous conversations.
Bester also knew he wasn’t going to be able to Remember it. And that he was supernaturally compelled to forget it. So why intentionally build anguish over something that would be awesome if you had it but that you simply can’t have?
I don’t think his failure to follow through with it, given his obligations—and compulsions—to not do so—should be counted as weighting against the efficacy of the principle.
I don’t follow your point. Who was discussing anguish? It seemed like mild annoyance in the original text, and a comment that annoyance does not imply truth in Joshua’s comment.
Theres also a psychological dimension to consider. To most wizards, and especially the rich pure bloods who this would be most relevant to, muggles, muggle-borns and anything associated with them are incredibly low status. Mere knowledge of muggles is seen as a major social negative (see treatment of Arthur Weasley). As such they would have a strong incentive not to investigate muggle knowledge, and if you suggested to Lucius that he made his fortune and power from dealing with Muggles his brain might actually explode from shame.
Yes, but if it were just that, you would except a few low-status wizard to suddenly become very rich through muggle-side tricks. Arthur Weasley is probably too Gryffindor to do it himself, but since he has quite a lot of work with wizards doing tricks with “muggle artificats”, you could except a few of them to get very rich by fiddling with the muggle world (especially muggle born, at 11 you know about stock markets and lottery) if it were so easy.
My best guess is that it’s illegal and the law enforcement is strong enough to not be worth the risk. Like, if you suddenly arrive at Gringotts with gold coming from nowhere, an investigation is done, and if that gold comes from a “muggle source”, you’re in trouble.
Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don’t come back, or people who never lived there at all. How many of them are actually going to understand finance well enough to have a sense of how to exploit it? And the ones who actually have money at Gringott’s are almost by definition the ones who never even spent those 11 years in the muggle world, so they may well not have any idea that finance exists. And even if they do, the ignorance and prejudice is rather overpowering, and may well prevent proper use of it. Someone who has both seed capital and the knowledge of how to exploit the crap out of it is going to be rare, and the DMLE is likely going to step on anyone who gets too egregious about using wizarding advantages to do so.
Remember, most of wizarding Britain is people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don’t come back.
I don’t believe this is correct. In fact, isn’t there a section in MoR where McGonagall relates to Harry that less than 10 “muggleborn” Wizards are being inducted into Hogwarts that year? (With Harry being one of them?)
Right, I meant to edit that and got distracted. Replace with “Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don’t come back or people who never lived there at all”.
“Halfbloods” the way you’re thinking don’t actually exist in MoR. Wizard + muggle = all their children are squibs. Yeah, half the children of a wizard/squib pair are wizards, but how often do you think that occurs? Canonically Harry is referred to as a halfblood because his mother was muggleborn; that sort of thing- not muggleborn, but not “pure”blood either- probably accounts for most of the population.
We don’t know if this is the case. Looking at squib/wizard descent rates from wizard/muggle marriages would be an obvious additional test of Harry’s genetic hypothesis, which he hasn’t done. We don’t know if Harry is correct about there being a single wizard gene.
I really don’t get how the genetics works in either MOR or canon. In canon, there are wizards with one wizard parent and one muggle parent, who aren’t squibs (Snape and Riddle for two). That implies it’s dominant. Also, squibs in canon are born to 2 wizard parents (Neville’s pure-blood and was thought to be one, and it’s mentioned in the definition), and squibs are implied to be pretty uncommon, which they wouldn’t be if they were all heterozygotes. In the end, though, I support EY’s right to make it work out however he feels like, because canon is confused and self-contradictory and MOR’s point about complex adaptations being either ubiquitous or absent is true.
In canon, there are wizards with one wizard parent and one muggle parent, who aren’t squibs (Snape and Riddle for two).
In canon they call “squib” the non-magic-capable child of two wizards.
In MoR, that means the child has only one copy of the recessive magic gene. (Either mommy didn’t love only daddy, or one copy of the gene got messed up somehow.) But in MoR you need to distinguish between genetic|squib (has one copy of the gene), and genealogic|squib (can’t do magic but has wizard/witch parents).
All genealogical|squibs are genetic|squibs, but wizards use the word “squib” only for the former, since wizards don’t know much about genetics, and about the magic gene in particular. They call anybody who isn’t a part of magic Britain a muggle (genealogical |muggle), even though they might actually be genetic|squibs.
An example: Wizard Nasty Pants does the nasty with lots of muggle women a couple of centuries ago. He doesn’t like commitments, so he abandons the women to raise their children alone.
All his children are genetic|squibs, but they’re raised by muggles and—after Mr. Nasty dies because he tried that with a witch married to a Gryffindor—nobody knows they had a wizard parent.
Mr. and Mrs. Ancient Robes have a squib (Mr. Robes was often away on ancient business), and Mrs. Robes leaves him to be raised by a muggle family, because she doesn’t have the heart to see him killed (Mr. Robes is kind of old-fashioned that way), and claims he died at birth or something.
A couple of generations later the magic gene still exists in a lot of Mr. Pants’ and Mrs. Robes’ muggle-raised descendants: half a genetic|squib’s children are also genetic|squibs, if the other parent is genetic|muggle, and people used to have lots of kids until recently. But they’ll be genealogic|muggles, and any wizard will call them muggles, because they’re not known to have a magic parent.
And then, two of these genetic|squib descendants marry (either the two trees intersect, or a couple of kissing cousins decide to do more than kiss), and a quarter of their kids are wizards. Magic Britain will call them muggle-born (or mudbloods, depending on political inclination), although in fact they’re lost descendants of wizards.
Similarly, when Ms. Broad Horizons, a witch of liberal inclination, falls in love with young muggle (but genetic|squib) Bendsinister McPants, half her kids will be wizards, and Magic Britain will call them half-bloods.
Since there is a single magic gene (apparently), it is also possible that a mutation will toggle between the magic and non-magic alleles. So it is also possible, though probably much rarer, that a squib (or, even less likely, a wizard) appears from completely non-magical parents, or that two magic users have a squib or non-magic child, due to simple mutation. How likely that is depends on the complexity of the gene, but it’d have to be much rarer than the above scenarios, unless there’s magical interference in mutation rates for that specific gene.
Also, we cannot completely ignore the possibility of the “magic machinery” (the one that recognize the genetic marker) to have some kind of shuffling process that’ll occasionally turn on or off the magical marker when an egg is fertilized. Either randomly, or based on events (triggers like “an egg fertilized exactly at the second where the moon is the fullest will have a high probability of having the magical marked added”).
We have no hints towards that, so Occam’s Razor would tend to give it a low probability, but it would seem coherent to me with the twisted, not really occamian, way magic seems to work. Harry’s and Draco’s experiment on the genes was low-scale enough so they had no chance of detecting any such shuffling.
But sure, adultery is a much more plausible explanation of why squibs would occasionally appear in pure magical couples, and why there are “muggleborn”.
Also, we cannot completely ignore the possibility of the “magic machinery” (the one that recognize the genetic marker) to have some kind of shuffling process that’ll occasionally turn on or off the magical marker when an egg is fertilized. Either randomly, or based on events (triggers like “an egg fertilized exactly at the second where the moon is the fullest will have a high probability of having the magical marked added”).
Or that there is no genetic marker at all and the machinery uses some algorithm of its own to determine who should have magic which is heavily biased towards children of wizards.
Well, Harry and Draco’s “experiment” (I’d say “poll” would be a better term) didn’t have a huge support population, but their numbers suggest that the bias would have to match suspiciously well with a genetic marker. That is, it seems that the actual results would be the same either way.
I agree with most of this. However, I think it is worth noting that JKR’s understanding of biology is about as good as her understanding of math or astronomy so I don’t expect her to have even thought of this sort of thing. I don’t think the nature of complex adaptations is a great argument in this context given that we’ve already found that magic doesn’t seem to act very much like what science tells us to expect in general.
While I support Eliezer’s right to do what he wants, I suspect that Harry will turn out to be wrong about this, and that we’ll find out in the story.
In canonical!HP, halfbloods are wizards/witches with one witch/wizard parent and one Muggle parent. “Dad’s a Muggle, Mum’s a witch. Bit of a nasty shock for him when he found out.” Muggleborns have two Muggle parents.
Sometimes people with a Muggleborn and a pureblood for parents are called halfbloods (Harry is one of these). Finer gradations aren’t referred to (I’m not sure what Harry and Ginny’s kids would be called).
I’m familiar with “pureblood”, “squib”/”halfblood”, and “muggle”/”mudblood”.
I was under the impression that “muggleborn” wasn’t a synonym for “mudblood”. I guess I’m mistaken about that, but in reading your response I don’t seem to be able to put a pin on coming to that conclusion.
“Squib” is a nonmagical child of magical parents, at least in canon. MoR seems to be using it as a genetic marker, which I’m honestly not sure is compatible with canon.
(Now that I think about it, if Harry’s genetic theory is correct, doesn’t a squib child of a wizarding couple imply that Mom was getting some on the side?)
.. Not nessesarily. I just had an amusing thought. The number one use of polyjuice is quite obviously as a sex toy, right?
Depending on how deep the transformation goes, it is entirely possible that the genetic lines of wizardry if anyone ever tested them would be enormously confusing, and a lot of squibs are technically the decendants of Jane Russell and Rudolph Valentino.
Probably! That or a mutation, anyway. But a few weeks ago I read about an interesting situation * in which a parent with AB blood and one with A blood can have an O child without adultery, because of another gene that sometimes suppresses the A and B antigens. That wouldn’t allow for varying power levels with blood purity, and would sort of be still “one thing that makes you a wizard.”
I can’t remember the name, and would appreciate if someone could remind me.
Mudblood means non-pure ancestry, and is thus broader than muggleborn; the children of two muggleborns would still be considered to be mudblooded, despite both parents being wizards.
One thing I did notice was that many readers (a) neglected simple solutions in favor of complex ones, (b) neglected obvious solutions in favor of nonobvious ones, and (c) suggested that the correct hints had been put there for deliberately deceptive purposes.
General announcement: I do not lie to my readers. Almost everything in HPMOR is generated by the underlying facts of the story. Sometimes it is generated by humor – I can’t realistically claim that comic timing that precise would occur in a purely natural magical universe. But nothing is there to deliberately fool the readers.
Methods of Rationality is a rationalist story. Your job is to outwit the universe, not the author. If it taught the lesson that the simple solution is always wrong because it is “too obvious”, it would be teaching rather the wrong moral. There are some cases where people have scored additional points by successful literary analysis, e.g. Checkov’s Gun principles. But the author is not your enemy, and the facts aren’t lies.
Now, yes, it is possible that Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Author Note on this very chapter is a lie, and he will suddenly reveal a whole series of barriers to paying the debt that will shut off everything from arbitrage to time turners to Dumbledore using the Philosopher’s Stone in the manner allowed in canon, without having given us any previous hints as to what they are. But I think Eliezer Yudkowsky is not lying, and that at least one of the many simple solutions proposed (or another simple solution) will work.
Doing something stupid, or just being an idiot in general isn’t the same as holding the idiot ball.
the person carrying the idiot ball is often acting out of character, misunderstanding something that could be cleared up by asking a single reasonable question or performing a simple problem-solving action, but that he isn’t doing solely because the writers don’t want him to. It’s almost as if the character is being willfully stupid or obtuse.
There are at least three methods of paying off the debt relatively easily, mentioned earlier in this discussion, that are fundamentally unavailable as ways of making money for the vast majority of wizards on the Wizengamot. One, using the Philosopher’s Stone, is explicitly mentioned in the very comment you replied to.
So, no, I don’t think the people in the story are holding Idiot Balls.
Descending through the illusory roof while invisible was a strange experience, and then Harry found himself in a metal corridor lighted with a dim orange light—which, Harry realized after a startled glance, was coming from an old-fashioned mantled gas lamp...
...for magic would fail, be drained away after a time, in the presence of Dementors.
But the others, maybe. Or maybe not; we also have
Minerva gazed up at the clock, the golden hands and silver numerals, the jerking motion. Muggles had invented that, and until they had, wizards had not bothered keeping time. Bells, timed by a sanded hourglass, had served Hogwarts for its classes when it was built.
I revise my position. 500 years seems to be excessive, in many areas. I would guess that the Hogwarts Express, and potentially even the toilets do rely on some level of magic, though.
My understanding was that most of the “modern” items (excepting things like the lamps in Azkhaban) are magic-based items, they simply got the ideas from muggle items. There’s no obvious indication that Minerva’s clock was purely mechanical; the one Trelawney used had voice recognition, for example.
Even torches are a “muggle-inspired technology” if you think about it. Purely magical lighting would be a glowing globe, or even unexplainably-lit rooms like the Wizengamot hall, there’s no reason to have it shaped like a torch (albeit proximity self-lighting and ever-burning) unless you got inspired by real torches and just went on with tradition, and at least many of those are probably not created by enchanting a manufactured torch. (Given how many there are in Hogwarts, and that you seem to find them even in rooms that didn’t exist yesterday, I’d guess the weird self-building architecture just includes most of them by itself.)
f they’re arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they’ve already figured out arbitrage
Not really. All sorts of arguments and fights over importation rights occurred even during the height of merchantilism. That importing goods can be profitable is a much more obvious claim than that moving goods between markets can be profitable. The second is more abstract. Moreover, they don’t think of the Muggle world as that important, so the fact that the Muggle world has imbalanced prices may not be obvious to them as something to even think about.
I disagree. Harry can do partial transfiguration. If he cannot figure out ways to earn insane amounts of cash just through that then he is too retarded to be called rational (remember that he can actually extract resources in ways the wizarding world cannot—as I write in another place: mining ++).
Plus you underestimate the degree of separation between the two worlds plus the extreme lack of respect the wizarding world holds for muggles.
And about the 100.000 galleons: well if they’re bright, ambitious and socially aware plus they’re using questionable sources they SHOULD act surprised. Not acting surprised would give away their game to the idiots remaining.
I will be severely disappointed if EY will waste time on the money issue. It doesn’t deserve much more than a paragraph. Perhaps two just to let us know that Harry won’t abuse it, because he doesn’t want to call too much attention to himself.
How would one legally extract money from partial transfiguration? If you have a large object you want transfigured, is it cheaper to hire the only wizard in the world who can do partial transfigurations, or a team of powerful wizards who can just work on the whole thing? And how often does that happen anyway? He could make money from teaching it, but that’d be slow.
Eliezer seems to believe that wizards are selectively stupid about economics, so you’re probably right about the general issue. They could need to import it because they can’t produce it locally at all.
I think partial transfiguration gains power by being a literal carving device. Normal transfiguration can force an object to take a shape, but they always revert. Partial transfiguration can carve pieces off selectively and have it be permanent. Eg, “the sculpture was always in the block of marble, I just removed what was not the sculpture.” Although you’d need to set up incredible safety protocols. Presumably you’d transform the waste into a non-evaporative liquid while keeping a bubble headed charm on until you finite’d everything.
Harry Potter is his own little subtractive universal CNC machine. He’s infinite axis; he can work on any material; he can work on any size. A mail order service could be a multi-million dollar a year business, depending on how tight he could control his tolerances. This goes doubly so because it’s in 1991 compared to modern day.
Edit: Actually, I suppose sufficiently powerful wizards could do this too. They would just transfigure the whole block of steel into an engine+oil, drain it all, then finite it back so just an engine remained. And I don’t think there’s a big enough market for Harry to work exclusively on sculptures in the sides of the mountains or anything. Drat, foiled.
Slurs? (oh you mean “idiots”? I’d refrain from that in the future; I didn’t mean to be offensive EDIT: later clarified to referring to retarded which I’ll also refrain from using in the future… me not being a native speaker will end up being expensive karma-wise).
Transfiguring a whole mountain would:
a) take more magical energy than most wizards could muster.
b) not extract any resources.
Partial transfiguring has the distinct advantage of not having to transfigure entire objects (such as mountains). Perhaps a spell could also help with actually finding valuable resources.
Besides that partial transfiguration is an excellent break in/out spell (as seen earlier in TSPE) and I do not recall saying that Harry had to stay legal. He’s shown already his ability to disregard the law (again TSPE) if he thinks it’s worth it.
Dumb used to mean mute. Personally, I think that’s going a little overboard with the political correctness, though. (And this from someone who doesn’t use retarded as an insult, or even crazy.)
(Basically unrelated, but: Do you or does anyone reading this know of anywhere online to read lots of case studies of schizophrenics, ideally without selection effects for “interesting” cases?)
No, but my local library has two autobiographies. Both seemed interesting to me, though.
Maybe you could look for internet support groups or forums or something. Stuff people write about themselves is probably more useful than stuff doctors write about them if you’re looking to learn about their thought processes.
Perhaps two just to let us know that Harry won’t abuse it, because he doesn’t want to call too much attention to himself.
I really hope Eliezer doesn’t spend more than a sentence on that—and even then I would want the sentence to be mild. Any more than that and it would strike me as too much use of explicit sloppy thinking to justify narrative convenience.
maybe I’m forgetting some piece of evidence but couldn’t the simple explanation be that muggle gold isn’t actually wizard gold and vice versa? Magical signature as mentioned or any number of other ways.
He’s got plenty of time, and doesn’t need that much seed money or that high a growth rate—unless Lucius has a plan that’ll get intolerable well before his payment comes due. I ran some numbers, and if he’s making 3% profit on each of one-third of all trading days for six years (which I think is if anything conservative—the arbitrage hack early in the story would be a couple orders of magnitude more profitable until someone catches on), he needs a principal of a little under 40 Galleons to break the 100,000 mark by the end of year 7. For 60,000, it’s more like 25.
That’s a decent amount of money if we’re going by the prices we’ve seen for goods, but I’d be surprised if he couldn’t borrow it from any of the suitably impressed adults he’s surrounded himself with. Especially if they’ve got a motive to screw the Malfoys over.
Upvoted for an essentially accurate analysis. However a minor nitpick: The marginal fees and resources involved will likely make this not very profitable if one started out with a small amount of money. So it would make more sense to start out with say at least a hundred Galleons or so. (Incidentally, why are Galleons capitalized? Is that convention? Other currencies like pounds, dollars and euros aren’t generally capitalized.)
It seems to be a convention of fiction. Lots of fictional terms are capitalized when real-world analogues are near-universally left lowercase. (Species names immediately come to mind.)
And for ridiculousness, have him start with a 100 million superlotto payout and get 5% instead of 3%. He’d have a couple hundred quadrillion dollars by the time he had to pay Lucius back. Obviously he couldn’t earn that much. Aside from that much money not existing, they’d shut down all trades well before he got to the first trillion dollars.
But still, it’d be amusing to have him with a giant mountain of gold equivalent to all the worlds combined reserves. “Lucius, you just grab that double-life-sized solid gold statue of myself. Don’t worry about the small change, I’ve got extra.”
Well, sure, that’s exponential growth for you. I’d actually rule out the scenario I present in the grandparent on narrative grounds: it’s not interesting from a plot or a rationalist perspective to be interrupted every chapter or two with a description of Harry’s latest trade, or even with his latest plan to wring another 5% out of his capital. (Maybe not that latter—Spice and Wolf pulled it off. But that’s a different kind of story.) Point is, this doesn’t need to be attention-getting in or out of story, just repeatable. There are boring options that would work (day trading with a Time-Turner being only the first to come to mind). Since that’s an unstable state for a story and the debt could easily have been omitted, at this point I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I’m not expecting that shoe to come in the form of unexpected changes to the financial structure that the early chapters set up, though. That does paint the Wizengamot in a rather unflattering light, but these are people that have only the vaguest idea of what cars are—an enormous blind spot concerning the Muggle world is quite consistent with the established culture.
Further, perhaps ambiguous evidence that Harry’s machinitions won’t be as successful or simple as he imagines. From Chapter 20, in reference to Quirrell’s insistence that Dumbledore pay for Harry’s Occlumency lessons with a neutral party:
Dumbledore was frowning. “Such services are extremely expensive, as you well know, and I cannot help but wonder why you deem them necessary.”
“If it’s money that’s the problem,” Harry spoke up, “I have some ideas for making large amounts of money quickly—”
“Thank you Quirinus, your wisdom is now quite evident and I am sorry for disputing it. Your concern for Harry Potter does you credit, as well.”
Dumbledore immediately identifies Harry’s money-making scheme as a terrible idea (even without knowing what exactly it is) and is actually willing to compromise his prior stance merely by being reminded how ignorant and childish Harry can be.
Dumbledore is probably the number one character, except for perhaps Snape, who has demonstrated the most knowledge of Muggle technology, culture, and institutions. I think it’s a good bet that Dumbledore, hearing Harry’s statement, immediately realized that Harry had hatched some hare-brained scheme with all kinds of horrible consequences that were obvious to Dumbledore, with his knowledge of both worlds, but opaque to Harry.
For what it’s worth, I interpreted this exchange as Dumbledore recognizing why it would be bad for someone to read Harry’s mind. In other words, a competent plotter who didn’t have society’s interest at heart could implement Harry’s ideas successfully to cause significant harm. I didn’t take the exchange to show that D believed the ideas wouldn’t work basically as intended with a minimum of unanticipated consequences.
In short, Lucius Malfoy shouldn’t be able to read Harry’s mind to gain a destabilizing amount of wealth.
I think it’s also important to remember that all these fancy smancy new ways of making money haven’t really been around that long.
Wizards live to be more than a hundred years old, and in general don’t have a bunch of children. There’s been only a couple generations in which many of these money making methods have been around—for example, the stock market has only existed in a convenient form since, say, 1910? And this story takes place in 1992. Eighty years really isn’t that long in wizard years. And while a small percentage ten-year-olds in the 1990s might happen to have some idea of how the stock market can be manipulated for personal gains, probably only a vastly smaller number may have known in, say, 1940 - before the information age.
The noble houses—the wizards that probably make up the majority of the Wizenagamot—are kind of implied to have been rich and powerful for a long time. If any of these people are young enough to have gone to Hogwarts after the thirties, and been humble enough to have taken Muggle Studies, and really paid attention when it came to the Great Depression, and happened to do background reading on the subject in order to exploit it, then sure, maybe it’s already done.
But given the information we have, I doubt this is widely known and regularly done enough to be a problem for Harry.
Certainly, the planning fallacy applies. And even if, for example, arbitrage worked the way it seems, and without the extra pitfalls that have been mentioned, there’s a lot more to it than just swapping silver for gold and back. Harry’s 11, he can’t leave Hogwarts, his finances are tightly controlled by Dumbledore, 100,000 galleons = 1.7 million sickles ~= 17 tonnes of silver. Your dad doesn’t just slip that into his back pocket. You’re going to need help lifting it, security to guard it, vehicles to move it...
On the other hand, Harry has a lot of resources that haven’t even been mentioned yet. There’s a house in Godricks hollow for example, and the Granger’s would probably be willing to contribute.
He hasn’t even really made an accurate count of his vault. He described the stacks as a rough pyramid, but then estimates they’re 20 wide and 60 tall—so in other words, each step of the pyramid is only three coins high. I made a small model out of poker chips, and it looks more like a flat than a stack. If it were a normal author, I’d figure the description was bad and the “estimate” was spot on, but EY is smart enough to realize that estimates aren’t that accurate. Harry might have underestimated and already have 100,000. Of course, he might have over estimated instead.
and the Granger’s would probably be willing to contribute.
A good chance they could pay off the entire debt. They seemed very well off.
I’ve got a friend who is a dentist. He could pay it off if he wanted to. 2 dentists? If they had decent business sense, it wouldn’t be a problem. This is in the US, however. I’d guess that pay scales are different in Britain.
And he still owes 60,000 galleons, which is 1.2mil.
A pair of dentists with over a decade of practice? My friend with 15 years of practice by himself could handle that. It’s not pocket change, but this was to avoid the torture execution of their daughter. I think they could pony up for that.
This has its own problems, though. The Grangers were concerned enough when it seemed Harry might be dangerous, since he was temperamental at their house. They’d pull Hermione out of the wizarding world if they knew that she nearly got locked in a place that actively sucks away happiness.
First, I don’t know whether it’s an option to bail out of the wizarding world at this point. She has a blood debt to Malfoy which has yet to be paid off by Harry. I’m sure Harry would be fine with whatever she chose to do, but I don’t know that the wizarding world is going to let her walk, at least until the debt is paid.
And she better hide very well is she does walk, because Malfoy wants her dead. The only protection she has from that is the wizarding world.
Second, if a boy saves your daughter from a torture execution, throwing away his fortune, and going into hock for a fortune besides, you might feel obligated to pay down that debt, and even repay him his lost fortune, regardless of your choices about being a part of the wizarding world.
As far as transporting, Harry has a magical chest that contains entire rooms and can walk on its own. Dumbledore, Quirrel, or any bribeable adult wizard can teleport him to gringotts or to any muggle bank or jeweler he would like to go to, and there are definitely spells for swiftly transporting items across a room or whatever. I think by far a bigger problem would be getting any muggle bank to accept 17 tons of silver in a single transaction without any sort of possible background checks.
Luckily, there are magical methods. Confundus charm, say, or the Imperius curse. (Yes, that does have the downside of being unethical, so Harry probably would not do it.)
Why not just chose a muggle institution that has a lot of gold and is corrupt enough you don’t mind stealing from(shouldn’t be hard) and walk in under the cloak of invisibility, alohomora the locks and fill up the bag of holding with gold? I agree that sounds too easy to not already have been done though.
I think this one would fall under the jurisdiction of the DMLE. In Canon, there were a few scenes with Arthur Weasley in which he discussed criminal cases involving wizards using magical powers against muggles.
Gringotts won’t mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.
“I wonder who came up with the idea of suspending liquid latinum inside worthless bits of gold. ”
Hm. What if there is an enchantment on all galleons that prevents them from being melted down? Or better yet, just prevents muggles from seeing them? That would solve a lot of these problems, and still would not violate what Griphook said. I can’t think of anything in cannon or in HPMOR that contradicts this. But I could be forgetting.
I can’t think of anything in MoR that contradicts it, but in canon, when a wizard tries to pay a muggle, the muggle later comments about someone trying to pay with a bizarre kind of coin. IIRC, it’s in Goblet of Fire, and it’s the muggle who runs the campground where they’re having the World Cup. He got memory-charmed afterward.
“You’re not the first one who’s had trouble with money,” said Mr. Roberts, scrutinizing Mr. Weasley closely. “I had two try and pay me with great gold coins the size of hubcaps ten minutes ago.”
Page 77 in my copy of GoF. So, yes, Muggles can see Wizard money, at least in canon.
Apparently confirmed by Dumbledore’s dilemma in Chapter 82. And we’re pretty sure that Dumbledore is smart and had access to a time turner.
Perhaps the simplest answer is that there’s no easy way to move large amounts of money from the muggle to magical world. Is it really possible to buy 17 tonnes of silver without attracting a ton of attention from governments?
On the other hand, if the real criminal is found before the debt comes due, it’s presumably a non-issue.
The more I think about this the stranger it seems. The war chest was five million pounds? Apparently Dumbledore doesn’t have any rich Muggle friends who’d be willing to spot him a loan on that whole ‘saving all Britain from a super-powered psychopath’ thing.
It’s not like the DMLE is all-powerful or anything, Moody thinks that the Eye of Vance was “currently in the possession of a powerful Dark Wizard ruling over some tiny forgotten hellhole that wasn’t in Britain or anywhere else he’d have to worry about silly rules.” What’s stopping any enterprising wizard from knocking over an African diamond mine?
And while yes, Harry’s debt is almost certainly going to be made irrelevant long before it comes due, the fact remains that one of the most powerful wizards in the world considered five million pounds to be really serious money. I’m kind of interested if (how) the story will address each and every possible moneymaking scheme and present reasons why Dumbledore couldn’t do them.
Just because the debt could be made irrelevant long before it’s due—not to mention long after the story is set to be finished—doesn’t mean the “certain rights [that Malfoy has] over [Harry] before then” won’t be a major factor in the story.
Also, IIRC McGonnagal was there, presumably she would have said something if Griphook was obviously lying or omitting something important, as suggested above. (Also, I got the impression goblins were really serious about money.)
Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.
Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..
Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were wizards.
And yet, when they mention a price of 100,000 galleons people are shocked. The reaction does not look like it’s 1/15th of a week’s worth of effort he’s got to worry about. Dumbledore views it as a major problem that Harry is 60,000 galleons in debt. We know from chapter 70 that it’s a known thing that witches and wizards will trick a muggle with a love potion and rape them. Yet nobody thinks to slip Bill Gates a love potion, convince him to part with $2 billion, and blow Lucius out of the water with 100 million galleons. And these are among the most financially motivated people in all of wizardry, not the common population, who consider 2 million pounds as more than weekend spending money. I notice I am confused.
I’ll brainstorm some possible explanations:
Gringotts won’t mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.
Gold isn’t available to purchase with muggle money: Wizards could own the gold exchanges and gold mines. They do nominal trading for electronics and jewelry, but the vast share of gold goes to the wizarding world. Possible, but it would drastically change the face of the real world (eg World Reserves would be a lie, and Ron Paul is a wizard).
The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is way more effective than I imagine: They can find and intervene in not only all cases of magic misuse (eg imperius or bank robberies), but check other means like love potions. Seems unlikely, considering the current crime investigation and how the last war went. Result—Arbitrage and stock/lottery manipulation work.
The wizarding world is full of complete inverse-omega class idiots: Always a good theory. But it doesn’t sound right for the entirety of the wizarding world (including a ton of muggle-born) to act so completely stupid.
The financial tycoons on Wizengamot actually do this: Maybe most of the Wizengamot fortunes exist due to questionable sources. That would explain the majority of evil people doing the voting. Still, that doesn’t explain the reaction to the 100,000 galleons.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This… actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn’t a great job market for muggle-born.
Something doesn’t add up. The Wizengamot is full of bright, ambitious people, most of whom have dedicated their lives to finance (makes 4 unlikely). If they’re arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they’ve already figured out arbitrage. They wouldn’t worry about importing ink, if they weren’t leveraging different prices between the market where they’re purchasing ink and the market where they’re selling ink. Something as simple as triangle arbitrage should be figured out immediately. If wizards already discovered arbitrage, but they don’t try and arbitrage in the muggle markets directly, it would be evidence that 1 or 2 is in play. 3 and 5 are already unlikely, so I guess 1&2 or 6 make sense.
I’d be interested to see if Harry actually manages to make infinite money, and if so what it means about the world.
I think that taking advantage of muggles in lots of ways is against the law, so imperiusing or memory charming a billionaire would be forbidden. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people have thought of and maybe tried using time turners to cheat the muggle lottery, so I’d give fair odds that’s illegal too. When it comes to arbitrage though, remember that while wizards in general may not be tremendously stupid, they tend to be incredibly clueless about the muggle world; remember that Arthur Weasley can pass as a premier expert on muggle artifacts. The fact that the values of gold and silver in the muggle world are totally divorced from their value in the wizarding world is likely to be very little known, and the concept of arbitrage may be completely foreign to them as well (look how primitive their whole financial system appears to be.)
The fact that Mr. Bester, Harry’s occlumency instructor, said he wished he could remember “That trick with the gold and silver” implies that a) the idea is not obvious to most wizards, and b) he thinks he would at least stand a chance of getting away with it.
I completely agree. Recall also Draco’s speech about muggles scratching in the dirt, and his reaction to Harry’s estimate of the lunar program budget. It’s not just wizards not paying attention to relative values of gold and silver in the muggle world—for the most part, the possibility that there could be a substantial amount of either in the muggle world doesn’t occur to them. Now you might expect muggleborns to know better, even after making allowances for the fact that they enter the wizarding world at age 11. On the other hand, if a muggleborn is clever enough to see the potential for profit, they might also be clever enough to see what Harry apparently does not—that calling attention to the fact that the muggles are ripe for exploitation is a Bad Idea.
I would actually suspect parents of a half blood (is there a name for this?) would be the weak link, rather than muggle-born children.
You’ve got people who have lived their whole lives as muggles, then suddenly they fall in love and get married and find out their spouse is a wizard. They’ve spent ~20 years in the muggle world and probably have a career of their own. No way they don’t ask their spouse to spend a couple hours and let them both live like kings for the rest of their lives. And if they don’t even get that much information about their other’s life, that’s some seriously messed up power dynamics in that household.
Pop quiz: What percentage of Muggles have ever heard the word “arbitrage”?
(Retracted because reply makes sense)
I’m thinking more “Go magic that banker and we’ll be rich.”
Or “Hey can you use that wicker spinmaster thingy to get us the lotto numbers?” I presume if the witch/wizard owned one they’d figure out what it does eventually. They’d have to after a long enough time living together.
Also, as Harry himself speculates, muggleborns, like his mother, probably tend to fall into the habit of not thinking of muggles as Real People anymore, because it’s too emotionally taxing, and they’re living in a different world. They may stop concerning themselves with the muggle world much by the time they’re grown up. The muggle raised wizards in the original canon certainly seemed to.
All good points, but I don’t think Harry is planning on “calling atttention to the fact that the muggles are ripe for exploitation”. He’s presumably planning to make the money without anyone except one or two adults he needs for transportation/permission/whatever knowing how he did it.
Oh, I’m sure taking advantage of muggles is treated even worse than taking advantage of pets. But there are a lot of rich people and a lot of ways to steal their money. Ditto with the lottery. Maybe they police the lottery, but do they police stock exchanges, leveraged currency trading, futures markets, prediction accounts, sports betting, Vegas, etc.? It takes ten minutes to think of a dozen ways to get effectively infinite muggle money with magic.
There’s no way to stop it all. Hence, the block (if it exists) has to be at the interface point. Somewhere in between when muggle money turns into galleons.
My guess is that rather than policing any of various muggle institutions, they investigate, as we do in our own world, whenever anyone appears to suddenly come into possession of large amounts of money for no clear reason, and if they find out they did something illegal, they throw them in jail.
Maybe people are already using wizardry to get huge amounts of money through the muggle world, but if so they may have to store and use the money very inconspicuously.
I wonder if they do. The wizarding world is a bizarre mix of modern and ancient traditions. It seems just as likely for them to have an income tax as not. So, they may or may not have the bureaucratic apparatus in place to know how much money people have and make.
I also wonder what the official stance would be on, say, bilking the stock market. It seems like standing up for muggle rights would be an unpopular political stance. Since there’s no direct victim and you’re doing things that aren’t even illegal in the muggle world (nevermind they don’t have time-travel), it seems unlikely the authorities would care to stop you, unless they have a blanket ban on anything that would result in inflation.
God, I’m such a double-nerd. There’s a dark lord to be fought and I’m hoping the next plot arc is about wizard tax law and how magical Britain handles inflation.
The funny thing is, it’s not really bilking the stock market. The whole argument for stock trading is that traders create value by accurately pricing securities, and thus allocating capital efficiently. Time travel is just a ridiculously efficient means of doing so. Given common access to Time-Turners, the stock market would literally be perfectly efficient(assuming that using turner-induced stock prices doesn’t violate the 6-hour rule). People without them would be very pissed off, but I’d actually argue it as being the right and proper way to run a stock market if the technology existed.
The only thing is, once you have enough time turners to control most of the volume of the market, there are no longer any linear-time causal inputs (read: people) deciding what directions the market will take. Market fluctuations would literally come from nowhere, though it might be best said that they would come from Time. And given Harry’s previous scary experiment (DO NOT MESS WITH TIME, ch. 17), I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to let Time be the one to control this.
Bolded word is redundant. This is a service being provided and nobody is having wealth that they have ‘rights’ to taken away. This is different in nature to using using time travel or to win at cards or roulette.
The muggles end up better off than they were AND Harry is better off. Almost as though it is a trade.
(Essentially I just agree with Alsadius.)
This is by far the likeliest explanation I’ve seen. It does lead one to wonder how many wizards are sitting on huge piles of muggle money and slowly converting it into galleons as needed.
In canon there is a Misuse of Muggle Artifacts office, but it’s not terribly competent.
However, the Minister of Magic also liaises with the Muggle Prime Minister; and presumably there is some exchange of information between their staffs. Any financial irregularities large enough to register on a national level could register that way.
In canon at least, it’s pretty clear that there is few interaction from Muggle Prime Minister and Minister of Magic, unless exceptional events occur. IIRC, in first 5 years, there is only two interactions : the Minister of Magic informing the Prime Minister about the escape of Sirius Black, and the dragons for the Triwizards Tournament. And there seems that not once did the Muggle Prime Minister directly contact the Minister of Magic, it only went the other way around.
So I’m sceptical about that. More likely the Ministry of Magic has someone working in the staff of the Muggle Prime Minister and informing the Ministry if something odds is happening.
This would require a wizarding equivalent of the IRS, which I’ve never heard of. I’ve never seen mention of taxes, but they obviously have to pay the ministry employees something. One of the consequences of their primitive monetary system is that it is very easy to obtain money without the government knowing it. Perhaps they could use muggle taxes to buy gold to be minted into galleons, and pay employees that way. In cannon, the prime minister knows about the wizarding world, and it’s possible that information of it is just highly classified.
I suppose money could be magically tracked, but there would still need to be a ministry department. And if that is possible, it easily defeats most money-making strategies.
If any money tracking is going on, I suspect it’s done by the goblins, who I believe canonically have means of magically tracking things.
You don’t need to magically track money though, to keep record of how much money is in people’s bank accounts, and take notice if someone who’s not supposed to have lots of money suddenly starts making a lot of very expensive purchases.
That’s assuming you put it in a bank account.
If you don’t put it in a bank account, then assuming no magical tracking, you could spend lots of money so long as you don’t reach a point where anyone starts asking “Hey, where did you get all this expensive stuff?”
Since the wizarding world has so much smaller a population than ours and seems to be quite class stratified, it’s quite conceivable that every person who’s supposed to be really wealthy is already known and identifiable, and any Joe Shmoe who tries making a thousand galleon purchase is instantly flagged as suspicious.
There’s another motivation for secrecy. Anyone who makes money off the Muggle world benefits from being the only one making money off the Muggle world. If they’re making lots of money, they don’t want other people to start thinking about how.
Neither of which are known to the Wizarding world, as evidenced by the Occlumency teacher’s reaction to his discovery of it. (and his discovery of it, and his discovery of it… :) )
Your assessment of the Wizarding World’s evaluation of the Muggle world. To the supermajority of Wizards, science is a total unknown. Economic and sociopolitical theory are terms they’ve simply never heard of.
They are isolated and effectively are like the apocryphal Chinese Emperor who burned his fleets because there was nothing left to discover; or the equally apocryphal Patent Office official who wanted to close the Patent Office in the 1800′s because there was nothing left to invent.
So basically what you’re seeing is what’s called “hindsight bias”. It is obvious to you, who knows what “Muggles” have, that the Wizards are vastly disadvantaged here—insanely so—but remember that as further demonstrated by Draco’s total ignorance of Man’s visit to the Moon, Wizards believe Muggles are “wallowing in the mud”. The idea that they might LEARN from Muggles is actively suppressed by a concerted political campain by a powerful and long-standing major political faction.
Like going off to live in a poor country if you have a first-world income to live on. I believe it’s already been remarked that this is about how magical Britain views muggle Britain.
Some counter-evidence for getting gold being difficult: In chapter 27, Mister Bester (the Legilimens who trained Harry) said:
Implying that it was at least somewhat practical as a means for getting rich quickly.
Bester has only thought about it for a few seconds so there could be problems that would occur to someone who is knowledgeable about the wizarding economy if they thought about it for a bit.
I meant it as Bayesian evidence. (updating P(Arbitrage works) down on Bester regretting means updating up on him not Regretting)
Plus, this is stronger evidence for us than for Harry due to Conservation of Details and the recent disclaimer by EY that there are no red herrings, and that simple solutions != bad solutions (and in fact, the opposite is usually true).
ETA: Also, Bester probably thought about it more more than a few seconds, at least the first time he saw it in Harry’s mind—Remember that he didn’t just see those Ideas/secrets, he’s also seen key moments of his previous conversations.
Bester also knew he wasn’t going to be able to Remember it. And that he was supernaturally compelled to forget it. So why intentionally build anguish over something that would be awesome if you had it but that you simply can’t have?
I don’t think his failure to follow through with it, given his obligations—and compulsions—to not do so—should be counted as weighting against the efficacy of the principle.
I don’t follow your point. Who was discussing anguish? It seemed like mild annoyance in the original text, and a comment that annoyance does not imply truth in Joshua’s comment.
Theres also a psychological dimension to consider. To most wizards, and especially the rich pure bloods who this would be most relevant to, muggles, muggle-borns and anything associated with them are incredibly low status. Mere knowledge of muggles is seen as a major social negative (see treatment of Arthur Weasley). As such they would have a strong incentive not to investigate muggle knowledge, and if you suggested to Lucius that he made his fortune and power from dealing with Muggles his brain might actually explode from shame.
Yes, but if it were just that, you would except a few low-status wizard to suddenly become very rich through muggle-side tricks. Arthur Weasley is probably too Gryffindor to do it himself, but since he has quite a lot of work with wizards doing tricks with “muggle artificats”, you could except a few of them to get very rich by fiddling with the muggle world (especially muggle born, at 11 you know about stock markets and lottery) if it were so easy.
My best guess is that it’s illegal and the law enforcement is strong enough to not be worth the risk. Like, if you suddenly arrive at Gringotts with gold coming from nowhere, an investigation is done, and if that gold comes from a “muggle source”, you’re in trouble.
Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don’t come back, or people who never lived there at all. How many of them are actually going to understand finance well enough to have a sense of how to exploit it? And the ones who actually have money at Gringott’s are almost by definition the ones who never even spent those 11 years in the muggle world, so they may well not have any idea that finance exists. And even if they do, the ignorance and prejudice is rather overpowering, and may well prevent proper use of it. Someone who has both seed capital and the knowledge of how to exploit the crap out of it is going to be rare, and the DMLE is likely going to step on anyone who gets too egregious about using wizarding advantages to do so.
(Edited first sentence for accuracy)
I don’t believe this is correct. In fact, isn’t there a section in MoR where McGonagall relates to Harry that less than 10 “muggleborn” Wizards are being inducted into Hogwarts that year? (With Harry being one of them?)
Right, I meant to edit that and got distracted. Replace with “Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don’t come back or people who never lived there at all”.
Halfbloods are more populous, and their Muggle parents probably give them some nontrivial connection to the Muggle world.
“Halfbloods” the way you’re thinking don’t actually exist in MoR. Wizard + muggle = all their children are squibs. Yeah, half the children of a wizard/squib pair are wizards, but how often do you think that occurs? Canonically Harry is referred to as a halfblood because his mother was muggleborn; that sort of thing- not muggleborn, but not “pure”blood either- probably accounts for most of the population.
We don’t know if this is the case. Looking at squib/wizard descent rates from wizard/muggle marriages would be an obvious additional test of Harry’s genetic hypothesis, which he hasn’t done. We don’t know if Harry is correct about there being a single wizard gene.
I really don’t get how the genetics works in either MOR or canon. In canon, there are wizards with one wizard parent and one muggle parent, who aren’t squibs (Snape and Riddle for two). That implies it’s dominant. Also, squibs in canon are born to 2 wizard parents (Neville’s pure-blood and was thought to be one, and it’s mentioned in the definition), and squibs are implied to be pretty uncommon, which they wouldn’t be if they were all heterozygotes. In the end, though, I support EY’s right to make it work out however he feels like, because canon is confused and self-contradictory and MOR’s point about complex adaptations being either ubiquitous or absent is true.
In canon they call “squib” the non-magic-capable child of two wizards.
In MoR, that means the child has only one copy of the recessive magic gene. (Either mommy didn’t love only daddy, or one copy of the gene got messed up somehow.) But in MoR you need to distinguish between genetic|squib (has one copy of the gene), and genealogic|squib (can’t do magic but has wizard/witch parents).
All genealogical|squibs are genetic|squibs, but wizards use the word “squib” only for the former, since wizards don’t know much about genetics, and about the magic gene in particular. They call anybody who isn’t a part of magic Britain a muggle (genealogical |muggle), even though they might actually be genetic|squibs.
An example: Wizard Nasty Pants does the nasty with lots of muggle women a couple of centuries ago. He doesn’t like commitments, so he abandons the women to raise their children alone.
All his children are genetic|squibs, but they’re raised by muggles and—after Mr. Nasty dies because he tried that with a witch married to a Gryffindor—nobody knows they had a wizard parent.
Mr. and Mrs. Ancient Robes have a squib (Mr. Robes was often away on ancient business), and Mrs. Robes leaves him to be raised by a muggle family, because she doesn’t have the heart to see him killed (Mr. Robes is kind of old-fashioned that way), and claims he died at birth or something.
A couple of generations later the magic gene still exists in a lot of Mr. Pants’ and Mrs. Robes’ muggle-raised descendants: half a genetic|squib’s children are also genetic|squibs, if the other parent is genetic|muggle, and people used to have lots of kids until recently. But they’ll be genealogic|muggles, and any wizard will call them muggles, because they’re not known to have a magic parent.
And then, two of these genetic|squib descendants marry (either the two trees intersect, or a couple of kissing cousins decide to do more than kiss), and a quarter of their kids are wizards. Magic Britain will call them muggle-born (or mudbloods, depending on political inclination), although in fact they’re lost descendants of wizards.
Similarly, when Ms. Broad Horizons, a witch of liberal inclination, falls in love with young muggle (but genetic|squib) Bendsinister McPants, half her kids will be wizards, and Magic Britain will call them half-bloods.
Since there is a single magic gene (apparently), it is also possible that a mutation will toggle between the magic and non-magic alleles. So it is also possible, though probably much rarer, that a squib (or, even less likely, a wizard) appears from completely non-magical parents, or that two magic users have a squib or non-magic child, due to simple mutation. How likely that is depends on the complexity of the gene, but it’d have to be much rarer than the above scenarios, unless there’s magical interference in mutation rates for that specific gene.
Also, we cannot completely ignore the possibility of the “magic machinery” (the one that recognize the genetic marker) to have some kind of shuffling process that’ll occasionally turn on or off the magical marker when an egg is fertilized. Either randomly, or based on events (triggers like “an egg fertilized exactly at the second where the moon is the fullest will have a high probability of having the magical marked added”).
We have no hints towards that, so Occam’s Razor would tend to give it a low probability, but it would seem coherent to me with the twisted, not really occamian, way magic seems to work. Harry’s and Draco’s experiment on the genes was low-scale enough so they had no chance of detecting any such shuffling.
But sure, adultery is a much more plausible explanation of why squibs would occasionally appear in pure magical couples, and why there are “muggleborn”.
Or that there is no genetic marker at all and the machinery uses some algorithm of its own to determine who should have magic which is heavily biased towards children of wizards.
Well, Harry and Draco’s “experiment” (I’d say “poll” would be a better term) didn’t have a huge support population, but their numbers suggest that the bias would have to match suspiciously well with a genetic marker. That is, it seems that the actual results would be the same either way.
I agree with most of this. However, I think it is worth noting that JKR’s understanding of biology is about as good as her understanding of math or astronomy so I don’t expect her to have even thought of this sort of thing. I don’t think the nature of complex adaptations is a great argument in this context given that we’ve already found that magic doesn’t seem to act very much like what science tells us to expect in general.
While I support Eliezer’s right to do what he wants, I suspect that Harry will turn out to be wrong about this, and that we’ll find out in the story.
Wasn’t “muggleborn” a term that referred not to blood-purity (“mudblood”) but rather to where you were born-and-raised?
I’m not up on my canonical!HP.
In canonical!HP, halfbloods are wizards/witches with one witch/wizard parent and one Muggle parent. “Dad’s a Muggle, Mum’s a witch. Bit of a nasty shock for him when he found out.” Muggleborns have two Muggle parents.
Sometimes people with a Muggleborn and a pureblood for parents are called halfbloods (Harry is one of these). Finer gradations aren’t referred to (I’m not sure what Harry and Ginny’s kids would be called).
I’m familiar with “pureblood”, “squib”/”halfblood”, and “muggle”/”mudblood”.
I was under the impression that “muggleborn” wasn’t a synonym for “mudblood”. I guess I’m mistaken about that, but in reading your response I don’t seem to be able to put a pin on coming to that conclusion.
“Squib” is a nonmagical child of magical parents, at least in canon. MoR seems to be using it as a genetic marker, which I’m honestly not sure is compatible with canon.
(Now that I think about it, if Harry’s genetic theory is correct, doesn’t a squib child of a wizarding couple imply that Mom was getting some on the side?)
.. Not nessesarily. I just had an amusing thought. The number one use of polyjuice is quite obviously as a sex toy, right? Depending on how deep the transformation goes, it is entirely possible that the genetic lines of wizardry if anyone ever tested them would be enormously confusing, and a lot of squibs are technically the decendants of Jane Russell and Rudolph Valentino.
Go, Mom.
Probably! That or a mutation, anyway. But a few weeks ago I read about an interesting situation * in which a parent with AB blood and one with A blood can have an O child without adultery, because of another gene that sometimes suppresses the A and B antigens. That wouldn’t allow for varying power levels with blood purity, and would sort of be still “one thing that makes you a wizard.”
I can’t remember the name, and would appreciate if someone could remind me.
Not necessarily. Genetic code changes in ways that do not make an nonviable specimen now and then.
Adultery is more likely, though.
Accurate deduction! Here, have a cookie.
Mudblood means non-pure ancestry, and is thus broader than muggleborn; the children of two muggleborns would still be considered to be mudblooded, despite both parents being wizards.
Where did you get this idea?
No.
Let’s quote the current author’s notes:
Now, yes, it is possible that Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Author Note on this very chapter is a lie, and he will suddenly reveal a whole series of barriers to paying the debt that will shut off everything from arbitrage to time turners to Dumbledore using the Philosopher’s Stone in the manner allowed in canon, without having given us any previous hints as to what they are. But I think Eliezer Yudkowsky is not lying, and that at least one of the many simple solutions proposed (or another simple solution) will work.
So everybody except Harry are holding idiot balls?
I think that’s an inescapable result of the idiot world J. K. Rowling made. There is just so much in cannon that makes so little sense.
Doing something stupid, or just being an idiot in general isn’t the same as holding the idiot ball.
There are at least three methods of paying off the debt relatively easily, mentioned earlier in this discussion, that are fundamentally unavailable as ways of making money for the vast majority of wizards on the Wizengamot. One, using the Philosopher’s Stone, is explicitly mentioned in the very comment you replied to.
So, no, I don’t think the people in the story are holding Idiot Balls.
In terms of the knowledge that Muggles have culturally accumulated, yes. They’re at least 500 years behind the times.
It varies. There are trains and gaslamplikethings and indoor plumbing.
I’m willing to bet most of them run on a non-negligible ammount of magic, though.
But the others, maybe. Or maybe not; we also have
I revise my position. 500 years seems to be excessive, in many areas. I would guess that the Hogwarts Express, and potentially even the toilets do rely on some level of magic, though.
My understanding was that most of the “modern” items (excepting things like the lamps in Azkhaban) are magic-based items, they simply got the ideas from muggle items. There’s no obvious indication that Minerva’s clock was purely mechanical; the one Trelawney used had voice recognition, for example.
Even torches are a “muggle-inspired technology” if you think about it. Purely magical lighting would be a glowing globe, or even unexplainably-lit rooms like the Wizengamot hall, there’s no reason to have it shaped like a torch (albeit proximity self-lighting and ever-burning) unless you got inspired by real torches and just went on with tradition, and at least many of those are probably not created by enchanting a manufactured torch. (Given how many there are in Hogwarts, and that you seem to find them even in rooms that didn’t exist yesterday, I’d guess the weird self-building architecture just includes most of them by itself.)
Not really. All sorts of arguments and fights over importation rights occurred even during the height of merchantilism. That importing goods can be profitable is a much more obvious claim than that moving goods between markets can be profitable. The second is more abstract. Moreover, they don’t think of the Muggle world as that important, so the fact that the Muggle world has imbalanced prices may not be obvious to them as something to even think about.
I disagree. Harry can do partial transfiguration. If he cannot figure out ways to earn insane amounts of cash just through that then he is too retarded to be called rational (remember that he can actually extract resources in ways the wizarding world cannot—as I write in another place: mining ++).
Plus you underestimate the degree of separation between the two worlds plus the extreme lack of respect the wizarding world holds for muggles.
And about the 100.000 galleons: well if they’re bright, ambitious and socially aware plus they’re using questionable sources they SHOULD act surprised. Not acting surprised would give away their game to the idiots remaining.
I will be severely disappointed if EY will waste time on the money issue. It doesn’t deserve much more than a paragraph. Perhaps two just to let us know that Harry won’t abuse it, because he doesn’t want to call too much attention to himself.
How would one legally extract money from partial transfiguration? If you have a large object you want transfigured, is it cheaper to hire the only wizard in the world who can do partial transfigurations, or a team of powerful wizards who can just work on the whole thing? And how often does that happen anyway? He could make money from teaching it, but that’d be slow.
Eliezer seems to believe that wizards are selectively stupid about economics, so you’re probably right about the general issue. They could need to import it because they can’t produce it locally at all.
Also, please don’t use slurs.
I think partial transfiguration gains power by being a literal carving device. Normal transfiguration can force an object to take a shape, but they always revert. Partial transfiguration can carve pieces off selectively and have it be permanent. Eg, “the sculpture was always in the block of marble, I just removed what was not the sculpture.” Although you’d need to set up incredible safety protocols. Presumably you’d transform the waste into a non-evaporative liquid while keeping a bubble headed charm on until you finite’d everything.
Harry Potter is his own little subtractive universal CNC machine. He’s infinite axis; he can work on any material; he can work on any size. A mail order service could be a multi-million dollar a year business, depending on how tight he could control his tolerances. This goes doubly so because it’s in 1991 compared to modern day.
Edit: Actually, I suppose sufficiently powerful wizards could do this too. They would just transfigure the whole block of steel into an engine+oil, drain it all, then finite it back so just an engine remained. And I don’t think there’s a big enough market for Harry to work exclusively on sculptures in the sides of the mountains or anything. Drat, foiled.
Slurs? (oh you mean “idiots”? I’d refrain from that in the future; I didn’t mean to be offensive EDIT: later clarified to referring to retarded which I’ll also refrain from using in the future… me not being a native speaker will end up being expensive karma-wise).
Transfiguring a whole mountain would: a) take more magical energy than most wizards could muster. b) not extract any resources.
Partial transfiguring has the distinct advantage of not having to transfigure entire objects (such as mountains). Perhaps a spell could also help with actually finding valuable resources.
Besides that partial transfiguration is an excellent break in/out spell (as seen earlier in TSPE) and I do not recall saying that Harry had to stay legal. He’s shown already his ability to disregard the law (again TSPE) if he thinks it’s worth it.
MixedNuts meant “retarded”.
… I need a slur to describe how dumb I feel now...
“Slow”? Edit: or no, that’s the same thing, isn’t it. Um. Probably a dumb question, but what’s wrong with “dumb”?
Dumb used to mean mute. Personally, I think that’s going a little overboard with the political correctness, though. (And this from someone who doesn’t use retarded as an insult, or even crazy.)
(Basically unrelated, but: Do you or does anyone reading this know of anywhere online to read lots of case studies of schizophrenics, ideally without selection effects for “interesting” cases?)
No, but my local library has two autobiographies. Both seemed interesting to me, though.
Maybe you could look for internet support groups or forums or something. Stuff people write about themselves is probably more useful than stuff doctors write about them if you’re looking to learn about their thought processes.
Good suggestions, thanks much.
Something oddly relevant that i came across recently, tendency to interpret things too literally:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17372545
It is sort of a stereotype though, so I do not know how real it is.
I really hope Eliezer doesn’t spend more than a sentence on that—and even then I would want the sentence to be mild. Any more than that and it would strike me as too much use of explicit sloppy thinking to justify narrative convenience.
maybe I’m forgetting some piece of evidence but couldn’t the simple explanation be that muggle gold isn’t actually wizard gold and vice versa? Magical signature as mentioned or any number of other ways.
He’s got plenty of time, and doesn’t need that much seed money or that high a growth rate—unless Lucius has a plan that’ll get intolerable well before his payment comes due. I ran some numbers, and if he’s making 3% profit on each of one-third of all trading days for six years (which I think is if anything conservative—the arbitrage hack early in the story would be a couple orders of magnitude more profitable until someone catches on), he needs a principal of a little under 40 Galleons to break the 100,000 mark by the end of year 7. For 60,000, it’s more like 25.
That’s a decent amount of money if we’re going by the prices we’ve seen for goods, but I’d be surprised if he couldn’t borrow it from any of the suitably impressed adults he’s surrounded himself with. Especially if they’ve got a motive to screw the Malfoys over.
Note that Harry secretly buried 100 Galleons in the backyard of his parents’ house back in chapter 36, so having seed money is not an issue.
Upvoted for an essentially accurate analysis. However a minor nitpick: The marginal fees and resources involved will likely make this not very profitable if one started out with a small amount of money. So it would make more sense to start out with say at least a hundred Galleons or so. (Incidentally, why are Galleons capitalized? Is that convention? Other currencies like pounds, dollars and euros aren’t generally capitalized.)
It seems to be a convention of fiction. Lots of fictional terms are capitalized when real-world analogues are near-universally left lowercase. (Species names immediately come to mind.)
The coin names are capitalized in the Potter books, yeah. Don’t know why.
And for ridiculousness, have him start with a 100 million superlotto payout and get 5% instead of 3%. He’d have a couple hundred quadrillion dollars by the time he had to pay Lucius back. Obviously he couldn’t earn that much. Aside from that much money not existing, they’d shut down all trades well before he got to the first trillion dollars.
But still, it’d be amusing to have him with a giant mountain of gold equivalent to all the worlds combined reserves. “Lucius, you just grab that double-life-sized solid gold statue of myself. Don’t worry about the small change, I’ve got extra.”
Well, sure, that’s exponential growth for you. I’d actually rule out the scenario I present in the grandparent on narrative grounds: it’s not interesting from a plot or a rationalist perspective to be interrupted every chapter or two with a description of Harry’s latest trade, or even with his latest plan to wring another 5% out of his capital. (Maybe not that latter—Spice and Wolf pulled it off. But that’s a different kind of story.) Point is, this doesn’t need to be attention-getting in or out of story, just repeatable. There are boring options that would work (day trading with a Time-Turner being only the first to come to mind). Since that’s an unstable state for a story and the debt could easily have been omitted, at this point I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I’m not expecting that shoe to come in the form of unexpected changes to the financial structure that the early chapters set up, though. That does paint the Wizengamot in a rather unflattering light, but these are people that have only the vaguest idea of what cars are—an enormous blind spot concerning the Muggle world is quite consistent with the established culture.
Further, perhaps ambiguous evidence that Harry’s machinitions won’t be as successful or simple as he imagines. From Chapter 20, in reference to Quirrell’s insistence that Dumbledore pay for Harry’s Occlumency lessons with a neutral party:
Dumbledore immediately identifies Harry’s money-making scheme as a terrible idea (even without knowing what exactly it is) and is actually willing to compromise his prior stance merely by being reminded how ignorant and childish Harry can be.
Dumbledore is probably the number one character, except for perhaps Snape, who has demonstrated the most knowledge of Muggle technology, culture, and institutions. I think it’s a good bet that Dumbledore, hearing Harry’s statement, immediately realized that Harry had hatched some hare-brained scheme with all kinds of horrible consequences that were obvious to Dumbledore, with his knowledge of both worlds, but opaque to Harry.
For what it’s worth, I interpreted this exchange as Dumbledore recognizing why it would be bad for someone to read Harry’s mind. In other words, a competent plotter who didn’t have society’s interest at heart could implement Harry’s ideas successfully to cause significant harm. I didn’t take the exchange to show that D believed the ideas wouldn’t work basically as intended with a minimum of unanticipated consequences.
In short, Lucius Malfoy shouldn’t be able to read Harry’s mind to gain a destabilizing amount of wealth.
I think it’s also important to remember that all these fancy smancy new ways of making money haven’t really been around that long.
Wizards live to be more than a hundred years old, and in general don’t have a bunch of children. There’s been only a couple generations in which many of these money making methods have been around—for example, the stock market has only existed in a convenient form since, say, 1910? And this story takes place in 1992. Eighty years really isn’t that long in wizard years. And while a small percentage ten-year-olds in the 1990s might happen to have some idea of how the stock market can be manipulated for personal gains, probably only a vastly smaller number may have known in, say, 1940 - before the information age.
The noble houses—the wizards that probably make up the majority of the Wizenagamot—are kind of implied to have been rich and powerful for a long time. If any of these people are young enough to have gone to Hogwarts after the thirties, and been humble enough to have taken Muggle Studies, and really paid attention when it came to the Great Depression, and happened to do background reading on the subject in order to exploit it, then sure, maybe it’s already done.
But given the information we have, I doubt this is widely known and regularly done enough to be a problem for Harry.
Certainly, the planning fallacy applies. And even if, for example, arbitrage worked the way it seems, and without the extra pitfalls that have been mentioned, there’s a lot more to it than just swapping silver for gold and back. Harry’s 11, he can’t leave Hogwarts, his finances are tightly controlled by Dumbledore, 100,000 galleons = 1.7 million sickles ~= 17 tonnes of silver. Your dad doesn’t just slip that into his back pocket. You’re going to need help lifting it, security to guard it, vehicles to move it...
On the other hand, Harry has a lot of resources that haven’t even been mentioned yet. There’s a house in Godricks hollow for example, and the Granger’s would probably be willing to contribute.
He hasn’t even really made an accurate count of his vault. He described the stacks as a rough pyramid, but then estimates they’re 20 wide and 60 tall—so in other words, each step of the pyramid is only three coins high. I made a small model out of poker chips, and it looks more like a flat than a stack. If it were a normal author, I’d figure the description was bad and the “estimate” was spot on, but EY is smart enough to realize that estimates aren’t that accurate. Harry might have underestimated and already have 100,000. Of course, he might have over estimated instead.
Maybe he should learn a magical counting spell.
A good chance they could pay off the entire debt. They seemed very well off.
I’ve got a friend who is a dentist. He could pay it off if he wanted to. 2 dentists? If they had decent business sense, it wouldn’t be a problem. This is in the US, however. I’d guess that pay scales are different in Britain.
I think you may be thinking of 100,000 dollars or pounds. 100,000 galleons is 2 million pounds.
And he still owes 60,000 galleons, which is 1.2mil.
A pair of dentists with over a decade of practice? My friend with 15 years of practice by himself could handle that. It’s not pocket change, but this was to avoid the torture execution of their daughter. I think they could pony up for that.
This has its own problems, though. The Grangers were concerned enough when it seemed Harry might be dangerous, since he was temperamental at their house. They’d pull Hermione out of the wizarding world if they knew that she nearly got locked in a place that actively sucks away happiness.
First, I don’t know whether it’s an option to bail out of the wizarding world at this point. She has a blood debt to Malfoy which has yet to be paid off by Harry. I’m sure Harry would be fine with whatever she chose to do, but I don’t know that the wizarding world is going to let her walk, at least until the debt is paid.
And she better hide very well is she does walk, because Malfoy wants her dead. The only protection she has from that is the wizarding world.
Second, if a boy saves your daughter from a torture execution, throwing away his fortune, and going into hock for a fortune besides, you might feel obligated to pay down that debt, and even repay him his lost fortune, regardless of your choices about being a part of the wizarding world.
Besides what dandavis says, even in canon Hermione memory-charmed her parents.
As far as transporting, Harry has a magical chest that contains entire rooms and can walk on its own. Dumbledore, Quirrel, or any bribeable adult wizard can teleport him to gringotts or to any muggle bank or jeweler he would like to go to, and there are definitely spells for swiftly transporting items across a room or whatever. I think by far a bigger problem would be getting any muggle bank to accept 17 tons of silver in a single transaction without any sort of possible background checks.
Luckily, there are magical methods. Confundus charm, say, or the Imperius curse. (Yes, that does have the downside of being unethical, so Harry probably would not do it.)
Why not just chose a muggle institution that has a lot of gold and is corrupt enough you don’t mind stealing from(shouldn’t be hard) and walk in under the cloak of invisibility, alohomora the locks and fill up the bag of holding with gold? I agree that sounds too easy to not already have been done though.
I think this one would fall under the jurisdiction of the DMLE. In Canon, there were a few scenes with Arthur Weasley in which he discussed criminal cases involving wizards using magical powers against muggles.
“I wonder who came up with the idea of suspending liquid latinum inside worthless bits of gold. ”
Hm. What if there is an enchantment on all galleons that prevents them from being melted down? Or better yet, just prevents muggles from seeing them? That would solve a lot of these problems, and still would not violate what Griphook said. I can’t think of anything in cannon or in HPMOR that contradicts this. But I could be forgetting.
I can’t think of anything in MoR that contradicts it, but in canon, when a wizard tries to pay a muggle, the muggle later comments about someone trying to pay with a bizarre kind of coin. IIRC, it’s in Goblet of Fire, and it’s the muggle who runs the campground where they’re having the World Cup. He got memory-charmed afterward.
So he definitely saw some kind of wizard money.
Page 77 in my copy of GoF. So, yes, Muggles can see Wizard money, at least in canon.
Apparently confirmed by Dumbledore’s dilemma in Chapter 82. And we’re pretty sure that Dumbledore is smart and had access to a time turner.
Perhaps the simplest answer is that there’s no easy way to move large amounts of money from the muggle to magical world. Is it really possible to buy 17 tonnes of silver without attracting a ton of attention from governments?
On the other hand, if the real criminal is found before the debt comes due, it’s presumably a non-issue.
The more I think about this the stranger it seems. The war chest was five million pounds? Apparently Dumbledore doesn’t have any rich Muggle friends who’d be willing to spot him a loan on that whole ‘saving all Britain from a super-powered psychopath’ thing.
It’s not like the DMLE is all-powerful or anything, Moody thinks that the Eye of Vance was “currently in the possession of a powerful Dark Wizard ruling over some tiny forgotten hellhole that wasn’t in Britain or anywhere else he’d have to worry about silly rules.” What’s stopping any enterprising wizard from knocking over an African diamond mine?
And while yes, Harry’s debt is almost certainly going to be made irrelevant long before it comes due, the fact remains that one of the most powerful wizards in the world considered five million pounds to be really serious money. I’m kind of interested if (how) the story will address each and every possible moneymaking scheme and present reasons why Dumbledore couldn’t do them.
Just because the debt could be made irrelevant long before it’s due—not to mention long after the story is set to be finished—doesn’t mean the “certain rights [that Malfoy has] over [Harry] before then” won’t be a major factor in the story.
Perhaps Griphook’s “nominal fee” is, like, a permanent portion of your magic, or one of your fingers.
Also, IIRC McGonnagal was there, presumably she would have said something if Griphook was obviously lying or omitting something important, as suggested above. (Also, I got the impression goblins were really serious about money.)