Hey all, bored at work today so I did a little simple math.

Assumptions: Muggle Britain population = 60,500,000. Wizarding Britain population = 3,000 (stated by JKR somewhere). This puts ~20,000:1 Muggles:Wizards.

Here's the ethnic breakdown by numbers of Wizarding Britain, assuming that it follows Muggle Britain, which it generally should.

White British: 2,518
White (other): 155
Indian: 53
Pakistani: 37
White Irish:35
Mixed Race: 34
Black Caribbean: 28
Black African: 24
Bangladeshi: 14
Asian (non-Chinese): 12
Chinese: 12
Other: 12
Black (other): 5


Age demographics get a bit harder to do, mathematically, because of baby booms. At first I was just going to double the ages of muggles, which seemed a decent fit, but then I realized that the baby booms would occur at different age groups and thus abandoned the hope. Anyone with a background in this stuff feel free to calculate that.

One thing I was able to nail down was the approximate number of Hogwarts students, that is people aged 10 - 18, which is 207. Oddly enough, this isn't as far off of what we see in the book as I expected from JKR's abysmal maths.

Hope this helps someone,
Kevin

 

Still... JKR didn't think much about it anyway - 3000 people and they have their own Quidditch League with a dozen different teams - everyone on a Hogwarts Quidditch team would need to go professional just to replenish the player pool.
Half of the wizarding world probably works in the ministry if you believe the books (which wouldn't even be that unbelievable - a wizarding economy doesn't have as much scarcity as ours, so they can support a huge Ministry.)

PS: If you say maybe half the population is pure-blooded and the other half has muggle background (self/parent/grandparent), then the ethnic breakdown would probably a bit different, wouldn't it? (Probably depends on the question: Did wizarding Britain mirror the imperialistic expansion of its muggle counterpart?)

 

Yeah, it's primarily a kids book, she didn't really need to think much of it through. I wish she had though, it's hard to read it without noticing some of the blatant plotholes.

Anyway, thanks Frank, this might be useful when/if I decide to try my hand at a HP story.

 

This reminds me of a very good and very detailed article on the Lexicon:

http://www.hp-lexicon.info/essays/essay-secrets-of-the-classlist.html

 

I personally don't think wizarding Britain and the UK are the same country boarders-wise. Remember Hogwarts is older than the UK and one of the founders was Welsh while it was built in Scotland. The demographics wont quite match up as distance means nothing to Wizards.

 

Did she actually mention that the population of wizarding Britain is ~3000? It seems to militate against the number of students in Hogwarts, unless there are many foreign nationals in the school and/or Harry's year is an exception in the number of students.

There are approximately 40 students in Harry's year and if we assume a similar number in other years, along with the average life expectancy to be more 78 years (the figure for muggles - JKR did say that wizards tend to live longer than muggles), we should at least more than 22,000 Hogwarts graduates. This is ignoring what other schools there are and how many graduates they produce.

But then the whole exercise is pointless. JKR could never handle numbers or dates properly. They mostly conflict and the end result is a mess.

 

And that, my dear gentlemen, is why we do research before writing fiction!
Sure, the idea "Harry Potter" turned out to be a huge success, without which we wouldn't be here. But still, that is a bit of a plothole, not a major one like many others, but one still.

 

well, I do have issues seeing how some of the really die-hard religious people would let their sons/daughters learn how to perform magic.
(Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live)

And even if there are statistics over religion and ethnicity, that does not mean that it always is that way.. I think the matter is being analyzed to the point where it's just plain stupid.

 

I love that biblical quote, it was added in the 1600's to fuel the witch hunting craze.

Proof positive that 80% of the bible is arse wipery.

 

Yeah the whole book has been rewritten and edited that often, that 90 percent of it are fake by now anyway, if it was even true to begin with...

I mean the whole new testament has been written a few years after the whole thing happened.

 

That page made me lol. Whoever put it together was obviously quite intelligent but it reeked of fanboyism. 'Remus Lupin' being a very well thought out, creative name for a werewolf. Or taking a person's name and geneology and determining where they live and how much their parents make. Overanalysing much?

 

I would say that Harry's year is exceptional in that there are fewer students then average. Remember that Harry was born during a war, where presumably the population was shrinking and people were having less kids. I would hazard that the generation after Ginny's, who would have been 1st years during Harry's third and fourth years at Hogwarts, are the baby-boomers that came after the war. The generation of 1st years during Harry's 6th year (had it been Voldemortless) is probably more indicative of Wizarding Population.

...But then again, I'd like to point out the inability of 3,000 people to support a work force. There's no way a population of 3,000 can support two major shopping centers (at least), a government, a hospital, a police force, a Quidditch league with 12 teams (and a stadium), a prison, and a school that has at least 280 at any given time. Plus the amount of books that were written, the fact that there are likely other Wizarding schools in Britain since Hogwarts was implied to be kind of a big deal, etc. I'd say the population of British wizards would have to be at at least 30K if you assume that what we know of in canon is the only stuff that exists. Probably a lot more, since I'm being very generous.

EDIT: also, if the population of GB is only 3K wizards, then the Voldemort thing makes absolutely no sense. On that scale, it's not a war, it's a kerfuffle between two rival gangs, with a lot of collateral damage.

 

Well put Lorelei. If I were a betting man, I would say that canon evidence points to the British wizarding population being somewhere between 30-50k.

From what we know, it is utterly ludicrous that the wizarding Britain population is only 3k.

 

The tiny population number only works for residents of the two magical shopping districts and even then is a bit small.
One detail not known is how many folks have been killed by tom riddle and grindewalds wars. If you make those numbers very high it helps to account for a small population, with the services of a large one and the grand hero status of Dumbledore and Harry Potter.

 

Even if we take into account the possibly large amount of casualties in the First Voldermort War and World War 2, I don't see how they are still able to maintain such a large society with only 3k people. It's been 10 years since the end of the First War, so logically the population should be on the rise, which points to there being even less people right after the end of the war. For so little people to require such a large bureacracy is ridiculous, not to mention an entire sports league, and all the assorted services we see in the books.

 

Not entirely. Remember that the wizarding public sector is much bigger than that of the Muggles, proportionally speaking. Also remember that maintaining the statute of secrecy is a very difficult job which requires a lot of Obliviators. This, to me, seems to be the primary purpose of the Ministry.

A society of 3000 would not work in the Muggle world, it is true. But we have no idea, really, how magical society functions. Magic changes everything.

Of course, this is all trying to find solutions to JKR's fuck up.

 

Like I said earlier in the thread; it's not even that unbelievable, that almost everyone works in the ministry or in a sports league or newspaper or something like that. You can import most products we need/produce easily from the muggle world or substitute them by magic.