I'm working on an outline/brainstorming ideas for a fic I want to write when this small issue came up. Since canon is a bit at odd's with itself on the purchasing power of a Galleon and it's equivalent in Pounds Stirling I'm asking what others have used as they're own rule.

And I guess I'll ask: Just how much does Harry have anyways. Or is this something thats unknown and left to the authors to decide?


Sorry if the questions seem stupid/inane/pointless, but I'd rather ask and be laughed at the screw up and be... laughed at? (I'd also like to a decent job on this fic, so yea)

 

The closest to an answer ever given is that James Potter would never have had to work for a living if he didn't want to. Y'know, if he hadn't been AK'd in the face.

And a galleon is, canonically, five quid. That exact value makes it sound suspiciously like a pegged currency, especially when you consider the coin that represents those five pounds is apparently made of gold and is quite a bit larger than a 1oz Krugerrand, which is worth somewhere in the region of eight hundred pounds.

The economics of the series is completely fucked anyway, so you're probably best off just handwaving it.

 

*grumble* Hate handwaving. Feels like cheating. Thx thou.

 

Just a tip though - if you're going to handwave it, make sure any prices or amounts are within line with your ideas of currency. I remember reading a fic where it was 1 galleon to 70 pounds, which seems reasonable, except Harry's account contained millions of galleons. Even for a rich family, that seems a tad ridiculous.

If its justified, okay, but try to keep everything within bounds.

 

Harry does not have a billion galleons.
Harry does not sell gold galleons to muggles gold shops for 1k quid an ounce.

Follow those rules, and you will be fine.

-edit- We know that the muggle world and wizarding world prices are very much different. It's not to hard to say that James Potter could live comfortably in the wizarding world without having to ever work. Remember that we never really see anything in the series that costs more than 10 galleons other than brooms. Living in the wizarding world and living in London would be like living in NYC compared to the middle of Montana.

 

Their entire system of economics is contradictory. If a galleon is 5 quid, then who the hell can't afford a new wand? Seriously, it's 35 friking quid. On the other hand, in 1991 an ounce of gold (dunno how big galleons are, though) went for around 200 quid. Now I can understand a family not having 1400 quid to spare, but that doesn't explain the price of other things that seem to be outrageous at that conversion rate.

 

Using that ratio and what I've been able to find out about average income in the UK (For an Upper-Managment position ie. Vernon's Job) I'm getting a better grasp for scale, so thanks.

:facepalm If only it was that easy.

---------- Post automerged at 11:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:58 PM ----------

Math hurts.

Using a 1G = $50 ratio, and using what Vernon would probably make a year ($34,000), and making some rough guess's as to when wizards would retire from the workforce (85-90) giving most people ~72 years of employment, I come up with a massive mess of numbers that end up looking like:

4079G 8S 25K for James to live the rest of his life without working.

This doesnt seem like enough money to support a family to me, until I remembered that James was the sole heir to an old family, that probably left him with his own mountain of Gold that he never got a chance to burn threw in his short life.

All this work just to figure out how much to bribe Vernon into playing nice. Its not worth it. But I'm an obsessive, so I'll probably spend half my time worrying about crap like this before I even have a first chapter down.

 

I say completely ignore Rowlings ratio and just work with the numbers you see in canon.

I believe it costs 7 gallons for a new wand and yet the Weasley's are unable to afford a new wand for both Ron and Ginny.

Hermione was given 10 gallons to go shopping for Christmas presents.

This shows that a gallon is worth a lot of money. Rowling is actually not that inconsistent throughout her novels if you disregard gallons to a pound.

I would say one Gallon is roughly 25 Pounds

This would make a wand cost 175 Pounds

Arthur won 700 gallons and they spent roughly 600 on a trip to Egypt. That would be roughly 15000 Pounds. Traveling with 5 children and 2 adults, would be very costly.

In my opinion, with this information, Harry's vault would contain around 5,000 - 10,000 gallons (which would make a nice plentiful pile) which would come out to be 125,000 Pounds to 250,000. Not necessarily enough to survive if you wished to live luxuriously but enough to get by if needed.

 

Hm. So either, the printing press (or the magical equivalent) has never been invented, and so they have to carve a piece of wood and manually (or magically) have to press it upon each page with ink... Which sounds quite far fetched because they have a news paper that reports twice a day. Or... Rowling is just idiotic sometimes.

Even with the 1:15 rule, a book costs more than a wand, which just should not be. Wands are hand made, suppose to be unique for each wizard (let's ignore that we learned only about 5 cores) and are literally the most important object for a wizard/witches life.

So yeah, minhoto, ignore canon prices other then the Triwizard Prize, the price of a wand and a few things here or there. Books (other then extremely rare ones) should not cost more than a wand.

I agree with Sesc, make your own damn system that makes sense.

 

The interesting thing to remember is that the Weasley vault in Gringotts did not have any galleons in it, rather it only had sickles and knuts. This would suggest that Mr Weasley does not have a salary high enough to warrant being paid in Galleons.

According to the Lexicon a sickle is worth about 30 pence. This being the case it must be assumed that wages in the wizarding world are significantly lower than comparable muggle positions. Even if Arthur does get a couple of galleons, which Molly has to use for essential purchases etc, he isn't being paid much at all.

Then again, wizards have less need of money than muggles do. They can repair things that are in terrible conditions, conjure things, animate things etc to make household tasks easier. Food and luxuries would seem like the only significant on going expenses.

A hit wizard is on roughly £42K a year.

A book shop assistant manager is on just over £2.5K a year.

A dragon feeder at Gringotts is on £420 a year.

These last two seem to support my theory that wages would be lower. The hit wizard wage may be artificially inflated by the need to provide incentive to join a particularly risky profession.

 

Remember as well that the biggest reason for high wages in our world was the Industrial Revolution, which the wizarding world had no need for. Before that came along peasants generally earned money in the region of £10 per year or less. It was only the highly educated, or the successful merchants, who earned much more than that.

 

In your fic, please don't make three errors in a single sentence. It will hurt too much to read it, even if the idea is sound.

Disregard anything JKR said, especially if it involved numbers. Prices are allowed to be strange because the wizarding world doesn't have economies of scale. Actually, it doesn't have an economy, period, but you can disregard that too.

 

From what I know, HP was made for children originally, random numbers were put together for prices of things. Ridiculous exchange rates between Galleons Sickles and Knuts were put in. The first book was what one would read to children. I don't think Rowling had a definite plot in mind. The 'young child prophecised (is this a word?) to kick the bad guy's ass' was first done in one of the epics of ancient India, 'Mahabharata'. I don't remember exactly but the soul in another object is in Ramayana most probably. Anyways, back to the point, Rowling planned to write this as a series for children. All the hype led to her trying to bank it all leading to shitty last three books.

If you have to focus on the economy in your fic, change the whole framework or you will be contradicting yourself soon.

 

Thanks for the link Sesc, and thanks everyone for the advice.

 

I'd buy that, but she's been widely quoted as saying she spent five years nailing down all these details to build a living, breathing world, which then leads to people trying desperately to explain away the huge gaping plot holes. When she keeps claiming she spent five years building a working world when it so self-evidently doesn't, it's not a matter of her not bothering because it's just a kid's book, it's a matter of her sucking at building a world. And it's aggravating because so many fanfic writers start pulling their hair out because there's no goddamn way to make any of it fucking work without rebuilding everything or relying on constant immersion-shattering handwaves.

Hell, even with Clouds, I tried to nail down the timing of the story once and discovered that JK hadn't even consulted a fucking calendar while writing the fifth book, so if I wanted to try to nail down dates I'd have to rebuild the timeline of OotP entirely.

 

That's the thing right there.

Back on point, basically if you are going to focus on any detail of the HP world you will have to create its framework from scratch.

 

Yeah, it was a plothole, no doubt.

Or she rubbed her two braincells together and realised that thousands of tonnes of precious metal hidden from the muggle economy but used as regular currency by wizards = a drastically different exchange rate in Gringotts than there would be on a muggle high street.

Of course gold isn't the same worth in the wizarding world as it is in the muggle one. Goblins hoard it, and wizards use masses of the stuff in everyday transactions. A galleon probably is worth a fiver, at most, if the muggle economy can't get its hands on anything from the Gringotts Mint. Gold to muggles = more valuable because there's less of it. If the worlds were suddenly integrated overnight, the price of gold, silver and bronze would plummet.

 

So what you're saying is that every single Muggleborn is completely retarded, because they've never stumbled onto the scheme of melting down galleons, selling the gold for shittons of pounds, exchanging pounds for even more galleons, and repeating until incredibly rich?