This is true, but that wouldn't even be necessary if they had realized Transfiguration was an option, and even starting from scratch with an animal, a deft Diffindo and some fire is all you'd need, vegetables the same with water and butter(?) you could turn from something else. Salt would have been easymode, and they even had mushrooms (organic materials) to transfigure into whatever they needed.

And it's not like they were entirely unfamiliar with those spells either. Harry had used the Refilling Charm to his advantage just the year before, with Slughorn. If Hermione got an O in everything up to Human Transfig., animals should be no problem, and since stones and trees are abundant, along with our trusty Cutting and Reduction Curses (Diffindo, etc.), even the acquisition of objects of similar volume and mass to Transfigure should have been easy. Between them, they have an O in Charms, Defense, and Transfig, and six Es in each of those as well. We've seen them turning inanimate objects into animals; nothing new there either. And it would have allowed Harry to be helpful with the curses required for breaking down materials and so forth.

Assuming Transfiguration to be the art by which one object is transformed entirely into another, there should be none of the weird limits suggested earlier in this thread, about nutrition content decreasing and so forth.

tl;dr: Basically, JKR wanted to show them struggling when it shouldn't have been that bad, wasting the opportunity to have them demonstrate their accumulative mastery of magic and experience over the course of the novels.

 

I said it before and I will say it again, JKR created a story not a world and not only no care whatsoever was made into making it into a world but also whenever she felt like adding a random mention she did so.

 

What do people use galleons for? Aside from broomsticks, candy, and clothes?

People just magic whatever they want out of thin air, so what do they buy?

 

Potion Ingredients, books, newspapers all that jazz

 

Based on Malfoy making fun of Weasleys living in a Burrow - building construction is done by expensive specialists.

Food also is not produced via magic for some unknown reason (or Hermione, Ron and Harry had attack of stupidity with their lack of food during DH).

 

Well, clearly there is some sort of economy, as people earn wages, pay taxes (how else does the Ministry pay wages), and buy tickets for Quidditch matches and what not. There are plenty of business and a bank.

I have to agree that I find it hard to believe that you can just magic your way through life even in the HP world.

 

Steal from Muggles? Maybe even in some official way they are part of UK government?

 

Maybe, the point still stands though. Galleons are being exchanged.

If you could just magic everything so easily, Gringotts wouldn't exist.

 

Here's a question that might deserve its own thread;

Is there an aspect of JK's universe that isn't broken when examined at more then a basic level?

Any time a discussion about population, economy, spell crafting, lore, etc etc gets kicked up here or on other forums I always see some variation of 'well she didn't really plan on this making sense in the end' or 'it's a children's book, worldbuilding wasn't her priority'.

I understand how some things might have been beyond her (who thinks to flesh out an economic policy when writing children's fantasy), but it seems like there isn't a single thing she built that could withstand fan scrutiny.

Is it just lazyness (probably not the right word but brain slow tonight) or is it a compounding fault ie. if one major aspect of the universe is fucked it screws up everything else, no matter how well it was put together.

 

I think that depiction of how society works is really well done. Various reactions to Others, collision of cultures, assimilation of people into another culture (Hermione) etc.

I think that general "argh it makes no sense" is result of fact that Rowling was not doing any worldbuilding, what was created is a list of plot devices.

 

It's just that the Weasleys are supposed to be dirt poor but they can afford to send 7 kids through schooling and are pretty well fed. Really, the only things out of their reach are tickets to really special events like the Quidditch Cup, really fine tailored clothing, and cool brooms.

I don't think they spend money on buying property because they inherited their house just like the Malfoys inherited their own manor.

So what's the real difference between a rich wizard and a poor one?

 

You use conjuring in your example. Perhaps you are correct and very few people can conjure a chair.

Would you say the same for transfiguration? Would it be rare for a competent 7th year to transfigure, say a rock into a chair?

I don't really recall if transfiguration is permanent, but if it is, and it is not unreasonable for a wizard to accomplish transfiguring a rock into a chair, than I could see a problem.

 

Does Hogwarts have a tuition?

Also, are there wizarding farms?

 

They way I see it, a "correct" Transfiguration - that is, a complete transfiguration - is permanent, but most students (not even people who get Os on their OWLs) never achieve this level. And the more complex the object (e.g. animate harder than inanimate, human harder than animate), the harder it is to achieve. Even the transfigurations of O-level students possess some imperfections - remnants of the prior object. You have to be top percentile material to be able to effect a complete transfiguration.

 

There is a discussion of Hogwarts tuition a page or two back.

 

On the subject of the economy, how many different jobs do we see fully qualified wizards and witches actually doing? Because I can only remember a few off of the top of my head, very few of which need specalist magical skills to do.

Ministry employee, teacher, Journalist or self Employed shopkeeper. It sort of explains why the cost of specialist items is so much, because HP may for all purposes be a post scarcity society, with all of their menial home labour, food production and day to day needs replaced with the ability to simply use magic on it and make the issue go away.

Whereas their more complex issues that need magical aid to work correctly still require payment (omniocullars, spell books, potion ingredients, cauldrons even if the metal work needs to be of a certain specification for safety reasons.) because the skills necessary for those roles are not easy to come by for the average wizard.

The HP wizards have the bread and circus issue sorted, all that remains is furthering their own knowledge and abilities without concern for the food, water and shelter issue.

 

The Burrow has an orchard and a chicken coop.

Hagrid has a pumpkin patch (used for Halloween but considering the amount of pumpkin juice drunk at Hogwarts some may be used for that). It's also described as:

Which suggests other things are grown there.

The Lexicon mentions vegetable gardens which contain

but I can't find a source on that.

The Hippogriff herd may be considered farming (not sure on this but were hippogriff steaks mentioned somewhere?). Also, the dragon reserves could be farms as Hagrid has a dragon steak in OotP.

The greenhouses should also be considered (i.e. if any of the magical plants are edible or more than just potion ingredients). That's all I can think of that relates to farming but considering these exist it's not unreasonable to assume other wizarding farms exist.