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Scholomance Meta: Population Statistics
So I read the two Scholomance novels, and have latched on with the joy of someone who has found Dubious Worldbuilding. Specifically, there is no way the family sizes as seen and wizard death rates, ages 0 - 18, add up.
"Even enclave kids were getting eaten more often than not before the school was built, and if you’re an indie kid who doesn’t get into the Scholomance, these days your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty. One in four is plenty decent odds compared to that."
Per glorious wikipedia, the current WHO replacement fertility rate is pegged at about 2.1 live births per woman: two kids for two parents, with a little extra for mishaps. One in twenty is about... 5% of kids making it to adulthood. With 5% survival, any woman who wanted a child to survive to adulthood would be looking at having twenty children to get one past those "mishaps". Leaving aside the heartbreak and emotional wear and tear, that's pre-industrial levels of childbearing. So far, we've been exposed to wizards from post-industrial cultures, some with brutal state, economic, or social pressure to not have oodles of babies (China, US dual-income situations, I'm looking at you).
If you start with 100 wizards, and all of them pair up and have two kids, that's another 100 wizards. Except only 5 of them make it to adulthood. Let's assume that's three women and two men. So those five pair or poly up and manage 2.1 kids per woman, that's... call it six kids. Round up 5% of six... one of those six kids survives to adulthood. So by the fourth or fifth generation there's not 100 wizards, there's no wizards - and that's leaving off the cultural disruptions and knock-on impacts of widespread destruction.
Even the 80% survival cited for enclavers in the Scholomance ("a substantial improvement over the forty percent chance they’ve got if they stay home") means that one in five of the most prepared, cosseted students don't make it out alive. That's a fifth of a generation knocked out. If that were happening to rich white kids in "our" real world America, that would be hideously unacceptable. The enclaves get around the replacement problem by recruitment, but that's cold comfort for the parent who sends two kids to the Scholomance and gets unlucky twice. Not to mention the kids who are unsuited for four years with no access to medications or adaptive aids.
Also, if 95% of indie kids are dying, pretty soon there's not going to be any desperate outsiders to recruit from.
That puts some demographic pressure on women to have kids, with powerful social impacts. In an optimistic world, women will be supported in having kids and a career. There would be a diversity of family arrangements to 1.) get kids into the world 2.) support moms and kids though childhood, puberty, etc. But it's equally likely women would tend to get pigeonholed into babymaking and child care.
So either that's an oversight, or Something Changed at some point.
Maybe it is an oversight! Maybe Novik really wanted the upside-down Hogwarts to be the lesser of two evils, and took a worldbuilding overkill route to get that outcome.
But that's such a giant oversight, I find it hard to imagine betas and editors missing it. So, maybe it's a clue.
I'd put my finger on either the founding of the Golden Stone enclaves, or later enclaves, or something someone did to make enclaves more secure which incidentally has bad fallout for the independent wizards outside "your" enclave. El is too insistent on the numbers, and also very aware of teenage enclaver indifference to non-enclavers (teen self-centeredness? Cultural self-centeredness? Watch for book 3 to find out more!) for me to think this is 100% an accident or oversight.
In line with this, I think the plot twists are not done falling from the pages of the Golden Stone Sutras. The phase-change spell El extracted in the first novel, and Sutras' relatively inert role in book two, feel like insufficient payoff for what's almost a tertiary character. Add to that El's infodump about the Pune poet-incanter circle who got their hands on some enclave-building spells and "imploded into a massive internecine fight" and I think we're not done. Most of them died and a few went to Jaipur and a couple of others renounced magic and purged all their mana and went to live in the wilderness as ascetics, and that's why there's no enclave in Pune. That's the what, but why did the Pune circle implode? Power struggle? Horrific ethical dilemma? (Overly invested reader?)
So yeah, I am dying for book 3, which hopefully will drop more shoes, pull guns of the mantelpiece, etc etc etc.
"Even enclave kids were getting eaten more often than not before the school was built, and if you’re an indie kid who doesn’t get into the Scholomance, these days your odds of making it to the far side of puberty are one in twenty. One in four is plenty decent odds compared to that."
Per glorious wikipedia, the current WHO replacement fertility rate is pegged at about 2.1 live births per woman: two kids for two parents, with a little extra for mishaps. One in twenty is about... 5% of kids making it to adulthood. With 5% survival, any woman who wanted a child to survive to adulthood would be looking at having twenty children to get one past those "mishaps". Leaving aside the heartbreak and emotional wear and tear, that's pre-industrial levels of childbearing. So far, we've been exposed to wizards from post-industrial cultures, some with brutal state, economic, or social pressure to not have oodles of babies (China, US dual-income situations, I'm looking at you).
If you start with 100 wizards, and all of them pair up and have two kids, that's another 100 wizards. Except only 5 of them make it to adulthood. Let's assume that's three women and two men. So those five pair or poly up and manage 2.1 kids per woman, that's... call it six kids. Round up 5% of six... one of those six kids survives to adulthood. So by the fourth or fifth generation there's not 100 wizards, there's no wizards - and that's leaving off the cultural disruptions and knock-on impacts of widespread destruction.
Even the 80% survival cited for enclavers in the Scholomance ("a substantial improvement over the forty percent chance they’ve got if they stay home") means that one in five of the most prepared, cosseted students don't make it out alive. That's a fifth of a generation knocked out. If that were happening to rich white kids in "our" real world America, that would be hideously unacceptable. The enclaves get around the replacement problem by recruitment, but that's cold comfort for the parent who sends two kids to the Scholomance and gets unlucky twice. Not to mention the kids who are unsuited for four years with no access to medications or adaptive aids.
Also, if 95% of indie kids are dying, pretty soon there's not going to be any desperate outsiders to recruit from.
That puts some demographic pressure on women to have kids, with powerful social impacts. In an optimistic world, women will be supported in having kids and a career. There would be a diversity of family arrangements to 1.) get kids into the world 2.) support moms and kids though childhood, puberty, etc. But it's equally likely women would tend to get pigeonholed into babymaking and child care.
So either that's an oversight, or Something Changed at some point.
Maybe it is an oversight! Maybe Novik really wanted the upside-down Hogwarts to be the lesser of two evils, and took a worldbuilding overkill route to get that outcome.
But that's such a giant oversight, I find it hard to imagine betas and editors missing it. So, maybe it's a clue.
I'd put my finger on either the founding of the Golden Stone enclaves, or later enclaves, or something someone did to make enclaves more secure which incidentally has bad fallout for the independent wizards outside "your" enclave. El is too insistent on the numbers, and also very aware of teenage enclaver indifference to non-enclavers (teen self-centeredness? Cultural self-centeredness? Watch for book 3 to find out more!) for me to think this is 100% an accident or oversight.
In line with this, I think the plot twists are not done falling from the pages of the Golden Stone Sutras. The phase-change spell El extracted in the first novel, and Sutras' relatively inert role in book two, feel like insufficient payoff for what's almost a tertiary character. Add to that El's infodump about the Pune poet-incanter circle who got their hands on some enclave-building spells and "imploded into a massive internecine fight" and I think we're not done. Most of them died and a few went to Jaipur and a couple of others renounced magic and purged all their mana and went to live in the wilderness as ascetics, and that's why there's no enclave in Pune. That's the what, but why did the Pune circle implode? Power struggle? Horrific ethical dilemma? (Overly invested reader?)
So yeah, I am dying for book 3, which hopefully will drop more shoes, pull guns of the mantelpiece, etc etc etc.