Realistic World-Building

This is a fun website, for a certain definition of fun: Medieval Demographics Made Easy.

Sites like that make me wonder how  much I ought to worry about such things when writing my own speculative fiction. I guess it is important, for believability, to make sure the numbers roughly work out (so that it’s believable that everyone won’t starve, for example) – but the page itself encourages you to fudge the numbers however much you want to get the desired result.

I also wonder how much thought the greats of speculative fiction put into things like this. When he was drawing his maps, Tolkien must have thought about roughly how much land they’d need to support the populations of the different countries of Middle-Earth, but then again he rarely if ever gave exact population accounts, so he didn’t have to worry about it too much.

Or take Gene Wolfe; how did he decide how many cities there were inside The Whorl (c.f. Book of the Long Sun)? The only way I can see would be by calculating the surface area in the hollowed-out part of the asteroid, deciding how much cultivated land there would be, then using something like the page linked to (though presumably requiring more research) to find out how many cities there could be. (Incidentally, I also sometimes wonder how the city of Nessus, in the Book of the New Sun, fed itself, since it didn’t appear to grow its own food and it was so big that shipping the food in seemed impractical.)

Then I consider that most of the short stories I write take place in completely unbelievable worlds – in one of them there is no food, people live on light, and in another there is actually more land in the city itself than in the rural areas – and I stop worrying about it, at least until I write a story that set in a world whose rules are remotely similar to our own.

Piracy

Firstly, an amusing website: http://www.thepirategoogle.com/

Secondly, regarding the recent increase in piracy off the coast of Somalia; the one good thing to come of it, in my opinion, is that people are reminded of what actual piracy is. It involves armed robbery, hostage-taking, and death. Whether making unauthorized copies of a movie or song is immoral or not, it is nothing like actual piracy in its severity. No internet pirate ever killed someone.

Now, on to the Pirate Bay trial. So, the legal debate itself – whether or not providing links to copyrighted material is illegal when you are not providing the material itself – is interesting, but fundamentally irrelevant. I tend to think the Pirate Bay should have won the trial on legal grounds, but I can understand the case against, given current copyright law. Really none of that matters, though; what everyone really cares about is whether or not piracy itself is wrong. Is it even possible to ’steal’ information?

Well…

Turin’s Manifesto on So-Called Intellectual Property

I like to look at this historically. It used to be that data was intimately bound up with physical property. Before the printing press, copies of books were made by hand; the book was valuable for its content, yes, but primarily because it was rare, difficult to produce, requiring hours and hours of painstaking manual labor. If someone wanted to make a copy of a book they had in their possession, they were free to do so; it would require a lot of work, and the new copy would certainly be theirs, since they created the physical artifact.

Then the printing press came along, and it became easy to make many copies of something – if you owned a large and expensive piece of machinery and could put in enough manual labor to produce a single copy of it. Making one copy and making a thousand copies required the same amount of initial effort, with little extra effort added for each copy. This made it so that, if someone wrote a book, they could publish it and make many copies of it, selling each of them for a slight profit – but that the few other people who had printing presses (not just anyone, since almost no one had such presses) could make their own copies of the book and sell them.

There seems something unfair about this; person A wrote the book, but person B profits from selling it because he just takes the text and prints it, giving nothing to person A. It was because of situations like this that copyright law was invented – giving a limited monopoly on the rights to print copies to the person who wrote the book. Anyone would still be allowed to make their own copies by hand, if they wanted to, but it would require so much effort they would be better off just buying a copy; copyright law’s purpose was to make sure that, when the common man bought a copy of a book, he bought one from the person who actually wrote it.

And copyright was for a limited period of time, because eventually the work would become public knowledge of sorts, and it wouldn’t make sense at that point to restrict access to it. That, or it would be forgotten, and it wouldn’t make sense to stop people from making copies of a book that would otherwise never be read. It’s better not to have laws that destroy knowledge.

In the last few decades there has been a radical shift in how easy it is to make a copy of something. Making an electronic copy of an electronic document takes seconds, and costs next to nothing, and almost any form of data – movie, book, song, whatever – can be made into a digital file. So when someone “pirates” something, breaking copyright law, they’re not anything like the people who set up printing presses to make money from books they did not write; they aren’t making money, the people getting copies of the books and movies and songs aren’t being tricked into paying the wrong person for the content; rather, data has been divorced from physical property, and people are beginning to act accordingly. When books had to be physical objects, it made sense to say that those objects could only be sold by the people who actually wrote the books; now, when books can be costlessly transferred online, it makes little sense to say they still must be paid for, and that it is stealing to create a digital copy of something and give it away for free. Again: Copyright law is a cumbersome legacy from a time when there was no way to transfer information except through physical property.

The basic point I’d like to make is that advances in technology require us to come up with different ways of encouraging the arts. Yes, the existence of internet piracy may cause a problem for the current music and film industries; that doesn’t mean we need to get rid of internet piracy, which is a natural result of the current state of technology. Rather, it means we have to find new ways of making sure artists can make a living from their work.

Before the printing press artists functioned under a patronage system; the poet Vergil, for example, was under the employ of the emperor Augustus. When the printing press came along books could be sold directly to the public for profit, and so capitalism and the arts became bedfellows. Now, with internet piracy making any profit from selling something along the lines of the current system dubious, a new system is needed. What it will be, I don’t know. But something has to change, and getting rid of internet piracy isn’t the answer.

Crime and Punishment

A simple question – what is the purpose of punishing criminals?

A common answer is that you want to deter future criminals by showing what will happen when they commit a crime. Punishment as deterrent. Makes sense, right? Well…

The obvious problem with this is that you’re not showing what will happen when they commit a crime – you’re showing what will happen when they commit a crime and are caught. In a sense, this turns it all into a game of odds. As a potential criminal, you just evaluate what you will gain from committing the crime, what you will lose from being caught, and what your chances of getting caught are. If it ends up being an average gain for you, commit the crime; otherwise, don’t.

Following this reasoning, “an eye for an eye” is only effective if your chances of catching the criminal are greater than 50%. Otherwise, he gains an eye if he succeeds, the changes of which are >50%, and he loses an eye if he fails, the chances of which are <50% – the estimated result is a gain of a fraction of an eye.

Of course, most people don’t actually consider taking an eye from an enemy to be exactly equal to losing one of their own eyes. They’d rather have the eye themselves even if it leaves the enemy with the eye. But consider theft – there, you actually do gain something from the crime. Let’s say I’m planning on stealing $10,000. If I get caught, I’ll have to give it back, and I’ll go to jail for, say, 10 years. Let’s throw in that I’ll pay a $10,000 fine. So if I get caught – if I lose the crime game – I lose $10,000 and 10 years of my life. If I win, I gain $10,000.

Sure, that looks like a bad deal, but only if my chances of getting caught are fairly high. Let’s say I value a year in prison at $50,000 per year (in other words, that’s how much I’d be willing to pay to avoid that punishment). So, in defeat, my total losses would be $510,000, and in victory, my total winnings would be $10,000. That means that if my chances of success are over approximately 98%, I should commit the crime – it averages out to a benefit, not a loss. It all depends on how much risk I’m willing to take on, of course, but to reduce risk just ensure that your chances of success are higher. 99%? 99.5%?…

The point is that some people will have those chances at success – or at least they will think they do – and so people will still commit crimes. Even with a literal eye for an eye – at some point, if I want to harm the other person badly enough and I think my chances of success are high enough – I will take his eye even if there’s a chance of it costing me mine. It’s actually an even better deal than the theft because they can’t make me give the eye back.

And, as Saint Thomas More pointed out, you can’t just increase all punishments to be extremely harsh because then people have no incentive to commit lesser crimes not greater. If I’ll get hanged for stealing, why not kill the witnesses so there’s less of a chance of getting caught? If I get caught, I die either way. Might as well decrease the chances of that happening. So you need punishments that are fairly reasonable. But then people only have to have good, not even great, chances of success before it’s worth it for them to commit crimes – 70%? 60%?

So how exactly is punishment a deterrent? It deters criminals who were likely to get caught. It doesn’t deter the ones who will probably succeed. But that’s really what we need to do. They’re probably the more dangerous kind anyway. An executive at a large company who can steal $1,000,000,000 and probably get away with it is far more dangerous than someone who can rob a convenience story, get $100, and have a fairly good chance of getting caught for it. “Deterrence” might stop the latter, but it won’t stop the former.

Anyway, that’s why I’m wary of the idea that punishing criminals is useful as a deterrent. So what is it good for? Education? Retribution? The former sounds absurd (the criminals who get caught aren’t the ones who need to be convinced that crime is wrong) and the latter potentially blasphemous (who are we to decide who is guilty and deserves punishment?). It might well be that deterrence is really all that punishing criminals is good for – the idea being that you don’t have to deter all the criminals, just enough to have some semblance of order in your society. Anarchy tends to be unpleasant.

But I suspect that so long as we have to punish criminals at all, there’s no hope of creating some sort of crime-less society… that would, after all, be a Utopia, a no-place. And any claim that a change in how criminals are punished will somehow drastically reduce crime should be examined very, very carefully. The only way to reduce crime is to reduce the criminals’ chances of success.

Afaron (February)

It’s strange – this month, I am, well, not overworked, but actually worked. I actually have stuff I have to do for school, and some stuff I’m trying to get done on my own (not for Orbivm), and I really don’t have a whole lot of free time to continue writing FFF like I wanted to or work on FE art.

And some of my time, of course, is spent writing this blog. Whatever.

The situation reminds me of my Econ class, the main lesson of which so far seems to be “people have limited resources”. Um, that’s obvious. Mine right now is time, usually it’s energy to actually do anything.

Though, I find that usually I alternate between thinking I have too much to do and not enough to do – right before I do my homework I’ll think to myself, this is way too much, I won’t have any free time tonight, and then I’ll be done half an hour later and think, what am I supposed to do with all of this time? And because I didn’t expect to have it, I usually waste it. But I can’t do outside work before homework because I’ll be thinking about my homework and how I have to go do it. I think that’s probably why I usually don’t get stuff done except during holidays.

Anyway, last month I was Jugarthus Massaesylus, comrade of Caius Regilius last Tribune of Silvium. This month… who? Since I haven’t written my Inferno essay yet, I feel pressed for time – I’d better decide soon.

Well, I noticed today another (accidental?) literary reference in Orbivm -  the cosmological set-up is actually rather similar to that of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the Garden of Eden located on an island across the ocean from the main continent. And in Canto XXVI Ulysses is revealed to have journeyed across the ocean to Mount Purgatory (location of the Garden of Eden) and there been destroyed. That’s similar in many ways to Tolkien’s story of Ar-Pharazon the Golden, who sailed from Numenor to Valinor and punished for it (I suspect Tolkien read Dante – probably some influence there; really, every work of literature is so interconnected it’s quite hard to discern what idea comes from where). And like I’ve said before, the story of Ar-Pharazon inspired my own story of Afaron, last king of Evrosia, who tries to do what Ar-Pharazon did but with somewhat different results.

So for that reason, if no other, I’ll be Afaron. Seems fitting somehow.

Copyrightless

Now, I don’t like copyright. But I really do need to sit down and read Free Culture eventually to clarify my arguments against it. It’s free to download; I’ll probably read it over break and post back when I’ve done so.

But this post itself has a more practical purpose. So far, I haven’t said anything about the license all of the stuff I’ve posted here is under. I think that means, by default, that I retain all rights to it. I wouldn’t really care if anyone borrowed my stuff, but currently they aren’t really allowed to.

My question is – should I explicitly place everything/anything here (the blog posts, the various stuff under “writings”, etc) under a specific license? If so, which one – perhaps the GNU General Public License, or one of the Creative Commons licenses? Does anyone have any expertise/experience in this?

Since no one is likely to want to borrow anything from this blog, it doesn’t particularly matter, but it can’t hurt to make it possible for them to do so.

Knol? I’d rather not.

I read recently that Google is planning what might be termed a rival to Wikipedia, called “Knol”. It will be for-profit, the money coming (of course) from advertising, and collaboration will not be a feature – each article is written by a single author. That’s what I can gather from what I’ve read.

My thoughts on this? Honestly, I don’t see the point. Who would want to use it?

It seems unlikely to attract many expert contributors – those types of people either want to be paid, in which case they won’t give away their services for free (or whatever compensation Google will offer – it doesn’t matter how much it is, there’s no way it can rival what the expert could get from an actual job, unless Google is planning to finance an entire encyclopedia), or they’ll want to actually give their knowledge away for free, in which case they’ll actually give it away for free, rather than put it into the hands of a vaguely ominous corporation that’s making money off of it.

But that is, supposedly, the main draw of Knol – unlike Wikipedia, which is open to all (though with many more quality controls than most people realize), it will be more authoritative. So if it won’t be, and if it will be cluttered by ads unlike Wikipedia, what’s the point?

The point, of course, is to make money. I don’t think Google will make money from this, but no one knows yet.

Now, allow me to rant about Google for a short time. Trust me, the above and the below are in fact related.

Part of what I find disturbing about Google is that all of its income comes from ads. How the hell can an ad-based economy support itself? It seems like almost every website supports itself just through advertisements. Often the people buying the advertisements are themselves supported through advertisements. How can this possibly be a long-term solution for any company? Eventually someone has to, you know, provide some service and charge money for it.

Obviously there are some sites that do so, but it isn’t like the internet has created any new ways of doing it – Amazon.com and eBay.com, and their derivatives, are the only online businesses that spring to mind, and both of those business models are not internet-specific – before people used Amazon, they bought books at a bookstore; before people used eBay, they went to garage sales. So how is it that the economy can now support hundreds of completely advertisement-based businesses when it couldn’t before?

I’ve never had an econ class, so I’m clearly not qualified to talk about this. But I’m allowed to be disturbed by it. It seems unnatural that businesses should be able to support themselves on ads. That’s just one of the reasons Google disturbs me.

And my fear is that Knol will be successful, and do damage to Wikipedia – but that eventually this ad-based economy will crumble around us and all of the ad-based services available online will crash and burn. Then the Free stuff like Wikipedia, which won’t be directly hurt, will be worse off than before because the ad-based stuff was competing with it.

Credit but not Control

I’ve said before that I don’t believe in intellectual property. Here’s an elaboration on what I mean by that, since often when people hear that they say, “wtf?!?!”

I do think that inventors, writers, programmers, etc, should be rewarded for the work they put into their discoveries. I use “discoveries” not “creations” for a reason. It is often said that an inventor discovers a new way of doing something, not that he creates that way of doing it. The same, I say, applies to writers and the stories they tell, or programmers and the way they design their programs. Computer programs are not created, they are discovered. Anyway, these authors (of methods, books, programs, whatever) should be rewarded. They should receive credit for what they’ve done. People shouldn’t be able to steal credit for other people’s discoveries. As far as that goes, I have few disagreements with anybody.

But I don’t think that the authors should have control over their work. An inventor who discovers a new way of, say, making ice cream shouldn’t have the right to stop anybody from in turn improving on his design, or incorporating his discovery into a larger work, or selling a similar product at a lower price so long as it is made clear that the original inventor was the discoverer of the method. And the same with literary works. The fact that an author wrote a book about a given subject should not stop anybody from writing an extremely similar book, or from improving the author’s original book and changing it to fit their own view of how it should have went, or from republishing it and selling it or distributing it for free, without paying royalties.  As long as credit is given where credit is due.

The question arises of course, of why anybody invent or write or program if all they got was credit. Well, just because ‘all they get is credit’ not absolute control over their discoveries doesn’t mean they can’t get paid for it. How would they be paid? The same way authors, inventors, and suchlike were paid before the (relatively recent) genesis of copyright law. Wealthy people commissioning pieces, people auctioning their services as inventor, author, etc, not selling specific works, and so on.

You think it wouldn’t work? I think it would, though of course it would change every single intellectual-property based industry.

With invention, I don’t think it would allow people to stop innovating. If anything, it would force companies to be more innovative, since the advantage they get from a new discovery would no longer be 20+ years from a patent, but only until the competition figured out what exactly was going on. (They wouldn’t be required to publish the internal documentation or plans for their products, after all.) And after the competition figured out what was up they would still be at a disadvantage, since the original company’s name would be attached to the discovery for all eternity.

It would indeed reduce the number of published authors (and musicians and filmmakers and…). Would that be so bad, considering that so much of what is currently published is, well, worthless? And this would, among other things, make authors of artistic merit more likely to be published, since the criteria for who got well-known and who didn’t would change from who could sell the most copies of a book to who could bring the most prestige to his patron. It would change things, definitely. But, I think, not for the worse.

This system is, really, already in place for many programmers, voluntarily. Hence the GPL.

Note that the only change this would institute is having the government no longer have patent or copyright laws – or, rather, have no copyright laws and have patent laws that were much different from current patent law. It would not change what agreements could be made between individuals or companies; there would be no requirements to publish or anything like that. It’s very possible that it would lead to huge “clubs” aka corporations that functioned much as the current government does with regards to these things and used contract law to enforce it. The main point of this is to get the goverment away from enforcing these things.

Anway, the main point is – credit, but not control. People shouldn’t be in charge of how their discoveries are used once they publish them.

Free as in Freedom

When RMS (Richard M Stallman) announced GPLv3, he talked a lot about the purpose of Free software. He says there are four freedoms the GPL is designed to protect:

Freedom 0. The freedom to run the program as you wish.

Freedom 1. The freedom to study the source code and change it so it does what you wish.

Freedom 2. The freedom to help your neighbor, which is the freedom to distribute exact copies up to and including republication when you wish, and . . .

Freedom 3, which is the freedom to contribute to your community, the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions up to and including publication, when you wish.

I completely agree with these four points where software is concerned. My question is, should these same Freedoms apply to things other than programs, and if not, why not.

Take a piece of literature. Substitute “program” wherever it appears in the 4 Freedoms with “book”.

Obviously Freedom 0 should apply to it. If you have the book, you should be allowed to read it and interpret it however you want. To say otherwise doesn’t make much sense.

It’s the same with Freedom 1. I see no reason the reader shouldn’t be allowed to change the story in their mind, or even rewrite the book so they like it better. Many people, for example, might want to do this with Harry Potter.

Freedom 2 is clearly more controversial. It sounds absurd to say you should be allowed to distribute copies of the book to whoever you want. And perhaps it is. But why is it so absurd? It’s perfectly legal to lend a book to someone for them to read. Republication is a bit more extreme than that, but it’s the same concept, I think. Perhaps the problem is that making copies of the book (as opposed to just lending the book itself) creates wealth. You’ve created two copies of the book when you had one, which is somehow wrong and evil.

Freedom 3 actually seems less controversial to me than Freedom 2. If I write a fan-fiction based on Harry Potter, why shouldn’t I be allowed to publish it and let other people who are interested in fan-fictions of Harry Potter read it? The issue would be that if the modifications are too slight then you’re essentially using Freedom 2, not Freedom 3. So everything comes down to Freedom 2, which we don’t allow because… because of the economics of it?

That seems to be the case. You can’t let people steal an author’s work (even though you’re not taking anything away from them) by copying it and giving it out for free! If you do, how is he supposed to make money?!

Well, it seems to be working all right for the Free Software peoples… lots of free software is being created under this regime of freedom. The difference between software and literature is what, exactly? Philosophically I support software being free because it’s just math. If you discover a mathematical formula you shouldn’t be able to keep other people from using it. But I don’t really see why literature is different; all you’ve done is discover a combination of words that have a certain significance, why can’t other people use those same words? And what about music, which is just a given combination of notes, and art, and…?

As you can see, I’m drifting towards the view that there should be no intellectual property. I think there’s a lot to be said for that position. Intellectual property never did make much sense to me…what makes a story mine after I write it, exactly?

The main objection to this seems to be that people won’t have an incentive to create if they don’t get something back from their investment of time and energy. I don’t like this argument because it seems to say that artists are in it only for the money. I realize that some are; and if our economy was such that they no longer churned out pot-boilers to support themselves, would we be that much worse off? I think not.

The stronger objection would be that even if they did want to create and wanted to put energy into it regardless of money, they wouldn’t be able to support themselves while doing so. Indeed, I’m not sure how such an economy could work. I’m not an economist. To find out, I would say, look at how the Free software people support themselves and, if possible, emulate that system for all these other systems.

Big Houses and Nice Clothes

Given that the 7th and (hopefully) final Harry Potter book is coming out in about a week, I would like to discuss said book and analyze one of the things that really irritates me about it. If you have not read the books (though I know no one who has not), this may sound like a kind of boring enterprise. But perhaps it will not be; for at the end I will make an attempt to digest this analysis and come up with a ‘revised Hary Potter’ concept (more likely to be a completely new story idea), and this will give a (perhaps) interesting look at how I approach writing.

—

My main problem is with the economies of the wizarding peoples. The Weasleys are poor. This is shown by their inability to purchase new clothing or new spellbooks (all are second-hand and rather worn out), the ramshackle appearance of their house (“the Burrow”), and the presents they give (always hand-knit sweaters from Mrs. Weasley). In contrast, the Malfoys are rich. This is shown by their large manor (which, though never seen, is mentioned on occasion) and their expensive clothing and school supplies (including the ability to frivolously buy a Nimbus 2001, a rather expensive broomstick.

But… why would these things be the marks of rich and poor? Sure, in our (Muggle) world, having a big house means that you’re rich. But that’s because big houses are expensive to build. For wizards, why would big houses be expensive? You just magic one up.

So for the economy to make sense… well, I have three mutually exclusive explanations. All are rather interesting to consider.

(1) My first is that magic must be incapable of creating big houses and nice clothes. (I have no problem with this; in my opinion, magic shouldn’t be able to do those things – though it does a lot of other things in Harry Potter I think it shouldn’t be able to do.) But that doesn’t solve the problem. Because big houses and nice clothes are also made by Muggles. Why couldn’t the wizards just buy their big houses and nice clothes from the Muggles, trading for them some slight magical trinkets (which would be worth their weight in gold in Muggledom) or just counterfeiting some money?

The explanation might be that trading with Muggles is forbidden. By whom? By the Ministry of Magic. Which was established by… apparently, by the circle of wizards who were around however many hundreds of years ago. In other words, by the ancestors of today’s purebloods. It sounds to me like peoples were doing exactly what I described above (trading with the Muggles for big houses and nice clothes), but then a group of wizards who already had what they wanted prohibited it – not, as they claimed, because it was bad for the Muggles to be interfered with, but because they wanted to create artificial scarcity. And they succeeded. The poor chap who was stuck with the Burrow (probably because he was some ascetic who didn’t care about his surroundings) doomed his descendants to a life of poverty, while the ancestors of the Malfoys happened to have a big manor (which any one of the wizards could have acquired just as easily) and have been considered rich ever since.

(2) At least, that’s one possibility. Another is that, in response to ‘you could just magic up a house’; magic can create big houses and nice clothes, but it is a long, arduous process, meaning skill at wizardry makes you able to have these things, and wealth is a reflection of wizarding skill. In response to ‘you could just trade for one’, this was forbidden not out of greed, but because they truly believed the Muggles would suffer in the long run if they interacted with them. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to see why parts 1&2 are linked and why a1 is incombatible with b2 and vice versa.)

But why would they believe that? It seems to me a rather foolish belief. I won’t delve into why it’s foolish, but here’s my explanation for why they adopted it… the Centaurs. The Centaurs are the ideal in wizarding society (even if the wizards don’t know it themselves). And the Centaurs refuse to share their second-sight knowledge with outsiders (most of the time – Firenze is an exception, and he gets banished from the tribe).

The reason for this, of course, is that the Centaurs (unlike the wizards) have no desire for big houses and nice clothings. They’re ascetics, essentially. They don’t think sharing their knowledge will help those who ask (they’re kind of fatalistic), and it certainly won’t help the Centaurs (what do outsiders have to offer them? They don’t need big houses and nice clothes, which means they don’t need money). So they don’t do it. But the wizards have seen the ‘what’ of the Centaurs’ philosophy without seeing the ‘why’. So they adopted it with regards to the humans, and thus harmed both wizards and Muggles.

(3) … Unless the wizards really do understand the Centaurs’ philosophy. Or have created one of their own that tells them to cease trading with the Muggles. Consider this – once everyone has big houses and nice clothes (or adequately big houses and nice clothes with the ability to get better at whim, which is essentially the same thing) – once they’ve fulfilled and doubly fulfilled the conditions for life of food, shelter, etc, – what is there to live for? If working can’t bring you any more happiness – as would be the case if magic takes essentially no work and can give you everything you want – what should you do with your life?

It seems to me that, once food, shelter, etc, are no longer scarcities, then only one scarcity will remain – other people. Relationships with others will become all-important. Romantic relationships, yes, but I was thinking more, who is friends with who, what cliques form, etc. If you accept this interpretation Harry Potter is actually a brilliant work of literature – the cliques of Harry, Ron, Hermione, vs. Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle, isn’t about good vs. evil, it’s about how once every other need is satisfied all that matters is who your friends and enemies are, not why it’s those people. If there is no need for real conflict, then create mere competition. Griffindor vs. Slytherin. Quidditch is the true meaning of life in the world of Hogwarts.

And Ron, not Harry, is the ideal wizard, with his room covered in posters for his favorite Quidditch team, and the Quidditch World Cup in the 4th book is the most important point in the series. It isn’t like in the spectacles that were invented to occupy the masses while Rome burned. Instead Quidditch occupies the wizards because nothing else is worth being occupied about – no need to worry about food, shelter, etc, and in Rowling’s completely secularized world there’s no desire for God, no longing for a higher purpose. Kind of bleak, really.

—

Contrived, you say? Maybe. None of these three sound like they were intended by the author. But the problem of economics in Harry Potter is a major one, and I see no better explanations. The reason is, of course, that this isn’t a question brought up by the author intentionally (in which case we’re supposed to rest assured that there IS an explanation, even if no one’s figured it out) but an unintentional one, brought about by J.K. Rowling not thinking through everything as she wrote the books.

Anyway, now that I’ve considered these three explanations (and went way more in depth with them than was necessary), I’m going to see what it’s shown me about the idea of wizardry, and specifically about having a society of wizards living in parallel with Muggle society.

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It seems to me that it is more interesting if our wizards are not like Rowling’s wizards, but rather like her Centaurs. It isn’t that for some reason they are unable to get big houses and nice clothes (since any explanation sounds contrived), or that they already have big houses and nice clothes (since that would probably be rather boring, though I suppose it might work). It would be better if our magicians, like the Centaurs, simply didn’t care about big houses and nice clothes.

Why wouldn’t they care? Well, perhaps because those things are only good because they provide (1) security, which wizards don’t need to worry about, and (2) prestige, which would be gotten in the wizarding world through other means – raw displays of power, perhaps? (After all, in a world where bigger houses and nicer clothes can be gotten with a metaphorical  press of a button, no one would really care about how big and nice their clothes are.) So the wizards wouldn’t worry about those things. They also probably wouldn’t tie themselves down to any particular location, since doing so doesn’t help them any (Muggles only do it for security), and it hurts them by not letting them discover new talent as easily (I imagine our wizarding community would be much smaller than Rowling’s – which, incidentally, seems to me of unclear size…). So they would form a kind of traveling brotherhood seeking out new members, training them, and…. What?

Clearly they aren’t looking for food, shelter, etc. Their basic needs are taken care of. Imagine what you would do if you never had to work another day in your life and all your needs would disappear. What would you do with your time? As I said above, I would think relationships would become much more important. Knowledge would as well – especially taking into account that learning is much more fun if it will teach you have to shoot fire out of your hand. Perhaps they would spend all their time creating art – art can give a life purpose, make it seem like it has a definite goal, completing the work at hand, and people need to have a purpose.

But of course if you’re going to make a story out of it you need conflict. Perhaps what I said above about conflict and competition holds true here – they would devote their lives to meaningless games, diversions, etc. Or to conflict just for the sake of conflict.

I remember someone telling me once about a movie called The Highlander, in which (if I remember correctly) there are a bunch of people that, for some reason, are immensely powerful, and can only be slain by decapitation. (They also have infinite lifespans.) For some reason they spend their lives wandering the earth, searching for others of their kind, and killing each other. Or something like that. This would be the same concept, except they don’t have infinite lifespans and they continually recruit new members. Hey, look, we’ve went from Harry Potter to The Highlander in just one page!

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Well, I don’t think a story idea has emerged full-grown from the ashes of Harry Potter, but one could certainly be gleamed from this post (which is, uh, 3.5 pages long in OpenOffice.org… sorry about that). I’m going to keep thinking about it and perhaps one will come to me. In any case, I think some interesting concepts have definitely emerged from my Harry Potter analysis (I was rather surprised by that “conflict -> competition” thing), and I’ve gotten in my requisite Harry Potter-related post (since the final book IS about to come out, after all) without sounding like I actually have a whole lot of respect for the books (which I don’t).

Incidentally, the above Harry Potter analysis happened in the form of a conversation between me and my older brother. In general talking over the flaws in a piece of fiction (book, movie, whatever) with someone else is the best way to get an idea of what you would have improved had you been the author (and thus what you can do better if you ever write something in that style).

Hoarding

I understand how economics work – supply and demand, all that stuff. But there’s one thing that consistently bugs me about how things are priced. Here, I’ll illustrate what my complaint is through examples.

Going to the movie theatre (unless it’s the dollar theatre) costs about $10. Fair enough. But for that same $10 you could buy the DVD of the movie and own the movie for the rest of your life. Now how does that make sense? It seems like the latter is worth a lot more than the former. But, you say, you’re only going to watch the DVD once anyway, so why do you need to buy it? Well, first of all, if it was a movie worth watching you’re probably going to watch it more than once. And maybe want to reference it on occasion. But also, do you not get a feeling of immense power when you own the movie?

And compare going to the movies to buying a book. A hardback copy of a book costs only $15. Would you rather go to the movies 1.5 times, or own a book? If it’s a book that you’re interested in owning, than surely you would rather own the book. For one, it will give you more entertainment (after the 3 hours of movie-watching, you’re done, but reading a book can take days). But also you can use the book any time in the future. You can lend it to friends, you can reread it if you find you can’t remember it very well… and all for essentially the cost of going to a movie. It seems like movie-going is pretty much a waste of money, no? And this applies to pretty much all ‘activities’ monies spent. I love going to baseball games, but if I had to pay for it… wouldn’t I much rather spend that $20 for a ticket and $10 on parking on a brand new copy of The Tolkien Reader?

The distinction, I suppose, is between transient objects and permanent objects. Of course, some transient objects are necessary. You need food to live. But I find it amazing how high the price of a meal at a medium-class restaurant can go – $10 per person, minimum. So if I just don’t go to a restaurant 4 times in a row (and instead live off ramen noodles or something, which cost $0.25), I can ’save up’ $39. I can than spend that money on getting LEGOs.

LEGOs are probably the perfect example of permanency vs. transience. LEGOs give endless entertainment. People often say that they’re overpriced, but it seems to me that they’re really underpriced. For the amount of entertainment you can get from one box of LEGOs – building with it, rebuilding with it, displaying it, engaging it in mock combat with other LEGO creations – you pay, depending on the set, between $5 and $80. But any size LEGO set seems to me to give much more entertainment than a trip to the ballpark, or to the movies, or to a restaurant, or any food whatsoever. The entertainment is permanent. LEGOs are forever.

So if economics are supposed to lead to things being priced according to how much pleasure they give the buyer… well, it seems to me that books, DVDs, LEGOs, etc, are all woefully underpriced. They’re worth three, four times their actual costs. And if I have a choice, I’d almost always prefer to buy the permanent object rather than the transient experience.

Must be the dwarf in me. I did always like Thorin Oakenshield.