Generally, people advance in their careers with time, reaching their apogee before retiring, sometimes at a customary fixed age and sometimes only when their health begins to fail, preventing them from working quite as hard as a person in their position should. Currently IRL people work into their 60s. Consider Griselda Marchbanks, who examined Albus Dumbledore’s NEWTs around the turn of the century and couldn’t have been young then - she’s probbaly over 150 years old. If magicals stay lucid into such advanced age, and Dumbledore is still able to fight at 120, their society should be very different from ours.

A magical person’s career doesn’t last a mere 40 years like a Muggle’s - instead it lasts over 100 years! Consider, Winston Churchill served as Prime Minister until he was 80 years old. What if he had another 40 years of work left in him? Why would he retire and let a young whipper snapper ruin his country? Or the CEO of a large investment firm. Or other people with lots of power they have amassed through many years of hard work. People who reach the top are not the laid back kind. They are men of action, some downright power hungry. Why would they retire at the peak, if they’re still healthy enough to work? I think they won’t retire when they still have many decades of productive life in them. So, with people of such experience, such achievements, such reputation still working, how could a forty year old be in a position of power? Be a cabinet member in government or a member of parliament, or a corporate executive? How ludicrous it is to expect really powerful people to have children still in school, in the magical world. Why, people under 100 are probably considered too young to be candidates for the most senior positions.

A pureblood Hogwarts student should have six generations of live “ancestors” living and working somewhere, unseen by our sucky POV. Even if they delay having children (though, one has to ask, why? The supply of pureblood brides is limited), canon is still missing more than one generation. If Lucius Malfoy is fifteen years older than Severus Snape and is fifty years old during OoTP, he is still too young to be the head of the family, and a member of the Hogwarts Board of Governors. For his father to be dead of old age, he would have had to sire Lucius when he was 70 years old himself. Not impossible, but implausible. What about Neville Longbottom’s family or the Weasleys? Suppose Arthur is Lucius’ age. Where are his parents? And his grandparents? And his great grandparents? All should still be alive.


So, either only truly exceptional wizards and witches live longer than muggles, or canon is missing hundreds, maybe thousands of people with no explanation whatsoever. This is a whole ‘nuther aspect of JKR’s innumeracy: not just the total population, but the demographics are all wrong.

 

I think it's well established that JKR missed one or two vital world-building points, and that can honestly be forgiven. She wrote an amazing story, a fantastic concept. The plot may have been sub-par, the writing stilted and lacking, but the story was incredible.

Hence her success.

Story is king.

As for your main point, there are some likely explanations... such as the Voldemort wizarding wars, World War II, and such. Perhaps your missing hundreds of wizards were destroyed. With powers akin to gods, and the whole wide world turned to chaos between 1939-1945, I can see thousands of god-like individuals perishing.

In fact, I'd expect it.

 

You're underestimating the role of war, I think. If you look at JKR's Black Family tree, a load of them died at ridiculously young ages.

Also, longer lifespans do not necessarily mean more kids. It all depends on how they live longer. Unless the mechanism delays menopause then you're not going to have people giving birth when they're 80.

Finally, as an aside, Winston Churchill got voted out because he was useless as a peacetime Minister. Dude wanted to invade Russia after WWII, the idiot.

With those caveats, I agree with what you say.

 

JK fails at economics forever, so can we stop making new threads built on ignoring this established fact?

 

Here's the thing. I was trying to write a shitty fanfic, and I just wrote myself into a corner by admitting that magical UK of the books is a lot like Lord of the Flies - it's run by children. It's not just that it's a children's book and the protagonists are children so everything is from a child's POV and everyone over 25 is "old" and exists only to be an obstacle (like rules). It's not even the YA trope that in order for a young hero to have a proper adventure, the author must first get rid of the parents (who wouldn't allow it).

I remember reading many Enid Blyton mysteries when I was nine and ten. I don't remember any plot, but the world had adults. The kids only solved crimes because they happened to see or overhear something they weren't supposed to, and they could spy on people because they had free time and could go unnoticed. The first two HP books were kinda like that, at times. But since OoTP, we find out that the adult world in which the kids live is batshit insane. It's not even like orphans who lived through WWII or civil wars, real life accounts of which exist. It's just plain crazy. And they alone can save the world, because all the adults are either dead or... what? And then I thought, let's account for all the adults that are implied when you have children who aren't cloned or assembled or conjured out of thin air. And I realized that even if everyone was a muggle, and people married after school and had a boy and a girl within a few years and lived to the average UK life expectancy unless killed, we're missing a lot of people.

But they're not muggles! They do marry out of school and (should) have a boy and a girl when they're twenty, but their productive lifespan is supposed to be much longer. Everyone who is important should be Dumbledore's age. Draco Malfoy should be strutting around telling everyone that his great-great-great-great grandfather is on the Board of Governors. Snape's isn't old enough to be a renowned potioneer, never mind when he was hired at 21 or so. When one's career is expected to last 100 years, spending the first 20 achieving a rank equivalent to Privatdozent makes a lot more sense than for muggles.

This leads me to believe magical UK of the 1990s is a post-apocalyptic world, only our POV character is too ignorant to realize this. They have suffered something like 80% population loss. Maybe even higher. The world is completely in tatters and they're carrying on pretending everything is alright. Children emulating adults according to their superficial impression of what it means to be "Head of a Noble and Ancient House" or "Minister for Magic".

Am I completely off base?

EDIT: JKR's Black Family Tree. I missed that. I've just seen it for the first time and found out that the characters in Growing Up Black are canon. Damn. They all die young, even for muggles. So, I suppose I can attribute to Voldemort all the deaths in the 70s, but what happened to Arcturus, Pollux, Cassiopeia and Lucretia in 1990-1992? And Phineas Niggelus, the Hogwarts Headmaster, dead at 78? He was too young to be appointed to the job, by my thinking.

So, what is the interpretation you prefer?

1. Only a few exceptional wizards live longer than muggles
2. 90% of the wizarding population die before their time
3. Don't try to make any sense in JKR's writing

 

It could just be that alot of the population left Britain. I mean, if there is a terrorist group randomly attacking people and killing them, what incentive is for many to stay? Considering how easy it is to move, expansion charms for all their items, and portkeys/floo for traveling. Even languages are not an issue considering Crouch Sr. speaks over 200 , so there is likely several charms/potions to facilitate learning them at minimum. Due to this, they can easily move countries if required, so why wouldn't they?

 

When you look at the wedding between Bill and Fleur in book 7, you'll find that they have at least a great aunt who's at the age of 107. Also, when she meets Harry under polyjuice, she says "another Weasley?" implying that there are many of them, so Arthur must have quite a lot of brothers, uncles, idon'tknowwhat. I always just assumed that Harry never knew of them, so we, as we see everything from Harry's POV, don't either.

 

Assuming Dumbledore to be the bar of how old people can work is a bad idea. Everyone thinks he's crazy, and I can't blame them. Maybe it'd be more realistic to assume that the average wizard can live slightly longer than a muggle/squib, but not usually to the length of Dumbledore.

I'd like to imagine that, since magic apparently makes people lazy (see screwballs like Mundungus, who steal even when they can do goddamn magic), I think the lack of stress in the magical people's lives is what makes them live longer. That, and the fact that there are few actually unhealthy characters mentioned in HP. Ron eats like a horse and his metabolism can deal with that, even though his only activities are walking to class and flying around on a broom. Another result of magic, perhaps, or just plain genetics or something.

 

JK can't even get Dumbledore's age right. At one time it's around 150, then another it's 120 odd. She's created a world where wizards supposedly live longer but, perhaps it's instinctive or what, written in characters that live muggle life spans. And then there's the many wars wizards have fought over the last century.

Of course I wouldn't discount lives lost in private duels and assasinations. The Blacks seem to be a family well used to that.

 

I'd say Albus was around 150 or 160. He was really old. Or at least he just looked that old. I think he was born in 1846 (1996-150=1846), if I go by that he's 150 by the time he's dead, then that would make sense.

 

She originally said he was 150, but eventually decided on 115, which makes his birth year 1881. Bathilda Bagshot was even older when she died, since she was the great-aunt of Grindelwald.

 

Your first option. Just because wizards have a longer life span than muggles does not mean they all live to be 200 years old. We only meet, what? Like, five or six characters that live for that fucking long of a time. It's just not the norm. But I suppose the fic your thinking of would be quite interesting. I would read it.