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The Dresden Files => DF Spoilers => Topic started by: dspringer1 on October 17, 2019, 06:02:26 PM
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This is a murky subject for the books as the author has provided very little detail. Some thoughts shared via the books include:
* The White Council has vast financial resources and pays it staff a reasonable some. Given the hints about how much Harry was paid as a regional warden, this sum probably allows a normal but not extravagant life for anyone working for the council.
* Some wizard abilities related to information probably allow some wizards to invest in the stock market or otherwise financially benefit from information.
* Clearly some wizards are selling items of power to other wizards/supernatural agents and can probably make a good living at this. But multiple comments in the book imply that making items for other people is rather hard and requires a lot of skill.
* Some wizards are in the entertainment business (aka - old Morty) or otherwise "pretending" to be entertainers rather than real wizards. But few could make a real living in this way.
* Some wizards can probably have a "normal" profession where they excel due to (in part) their wizard abilities. And Ectomancer would probably make a good detective or a geomancer a good structural or mining engineer.
However, it does seem like the study of magic is a very time consuming endeavor that makes "other careers" a challenge. Add in the issues with technology and it seems like most wizards would have a tough time earning substantial income without engaging in questionable activities.
Anybody else see things differently?
There are probably only a few thousand real wizards of the white council in the world, so realistically there can only be less than a dozen wizards in most countries. United States and European countries are probably the only exceptions. That small a population allows for some really specialized niches.
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* Some wizard abilities related to information probably allow some wizards to invest in the stock market or otherwise financially benefit from information.
You'd have to be careful not to overplay that, though, and make enough deliberate small mistakes to pass for lucky but not unnaturally so. Making a killing on a pattern of what looks like insider trading is going to draw law enforcement attention sooner or later.
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Enumerating for convenience...
- The White Council has vast financial resources and pays it staff a reasonable some. Given the hints about how much Harry was paid as a regional warden, this sum probably allows a normal but not extravagant life for anyone working for the council.
- Some wizard abilities related to information probably allow some wizards to invest in the stock market or otherwise financially benefit from information.
- Clearly some wizards are selling items of power to other wizards/supernatural agents and can probably make a good living at this. But multiple comments in the book imply that making items for other people is rather hard and requires a lot of skill.
- Some wizards are in the entertainment business (aka - old Morty) or otherwise "pretending" to be entertainers rather than real wizards. But few could make a real living in this way.
- Some wizards can probably have a "normal" profession where they excel due to (in part) their wizard abilities. And Ectomancer would probably make a good detective or a geomancer a good structural or mining engineer.
I expect #2 is much of what causes #1. I think it might even stray over into industrial / commercial espionage, on occasion, mysterious theft, or other "only if he can do magic" sorts of ill-gotten gains. Breaking mortal law may be "in bad taste" or something, but doesn't violate the Laws of Magic, so... no (wizardly) penalty. Other than wizards who find out, and may... snub you, or something? Speak disparagingly of how tawdry you behave?
The WC probably controls (or IS) at least one major investment house in each major financial center in the world.
I think #3 gets many wizards some capital, which they invest via the WC "investment engine" ... and probably do very well indeed.
I think very few WC wizards are "in entertainment," per #4. Morty is a sub-wizard talent; poweful ectomancer, but that's just not enough... he has no non-ectomantic powers.
#5 seems possible, but honestly unlikely -- I think few wizards are willing to "work a normal job" like Harry is. But since you mention Geomancy... that'd be great for finding gold, or gems. Aquamancy might find wrecked ships, a few of which will have treasure, and many of which will have other value. Etc.
Mostly, I expect wizards do the #1 / #2 / #3 cycle: Work for the WC, or make items for the WC for "pay," and invest with the WC "financial wizards;" they're probably comfortably well-off after not very long... well-to-do shortly thereafter, and heading rapidly toward filthy rich, if they care to keep investing their time.
The WC is acting as their BANK. You know banks... they're a wealth-making engine! The WC probably does gloriously-well, as an institution, just handling investments for all their members.
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I imagine most wizards don't need to work.
Before mechanization of everything, a wizard would probably have a fantastic competitive edge in most fields. By not existing at a subsistence level, they would have been afforded the opportunity to invest in relatively safe ways. After 100 years of this, they wouldn't need to work, so I imagine most older wizards don't need to work.
A lot of jobs would still be very competitive for a wizard. I imagine a wizard who knows some Cobbs could make a living by "being" a cobbler without doing much. They might even be able to profit without doing anything but setting up a business: somebody to take payment and shoes and return said shoes during business hours, somebody to manage the books and bills. This could apply to every job that fairies helped with in any fairy tale. Toot was a fairy who did farm work. Most of these fairies situations would probably be similar to the Cobbs who were desperate for work. Industrialization/mechanization put many fairies out of work.
I imagine being a courier would have been very profitable before the steam engine or even air travel. Smuggling would still be pretty profitable.
Many wizards probably leave a lot of their wealth to former apprentices. Most of their family is likely so distantly related that they would rather leave things to someone who knows their name. Therefore, many wizards are probably wealthy from inherited wealth.
A lot of wizards probably have an opportunity like Harry in Skin Game to make a fantastic amount of money relatively early on in life, and most of the time it wouldn't be very dangerous or morally questionable.
Eb is a farmer. I don't know if he's a professional farmer, or a hobbyist.
I think a better formulation of your question might be "how do young wizards make a living?"
Combat, stealth, or illusion oriented wizards could make a good deal of money by robbing/burgling drug dealers. Information oriented wizards could definitely make a lot of money investing or gambling. That's especially true if the information is from the future.
Ulsharavas stated Harry could have other careers, focus on his magical studies, use his "skills for material gain and lining in wealth," so I imagine there is a broad spectrum of activities that any wizard could do to easily make a living.
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Well, Harry did use magic for his PI jobs.
As stated before, Eb is a farmer.
I can imagine wizards being teachers, various consultants, craftsmen, psychologists, even firefighters or priests and several other professions where using technology can be avoided.
And there is no need to use magic constantly in daily live.
I don't think they do not work at all. At least the young ones (up to 60, 70, 80 years old perhaps). I mean, they seem to live among non-magical people. It would be in their interest not to draw attention to themselves by hanging out in their labs all day wearing stained robes, cackling over bubbling cauldrons and drawing circles everywhere.
Harry appears to be the only one or at least one of the few, who openly admits that he is a wizard.
I've read about certain wizards in London's police. ;)
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I think the benefit of compound interest can be seriously oversold - at least as soemthing that provides real benefit to most wizards.
It requires several elements to be successful and all are problematic for wizards.
1) The person must first have wealth before they can invest wealth. Few people have the personality to sock away substantial resources today, so I cannot imagine the wizard population is filled with a hoard of atypical savers. So a poor or even middle class wizard is not going to be able to save enough money to create a small fortune through compound interest.
2) You must have something to invest "in". Stock or bond markets really did not exist before the 1600s and before that investments were typically limited to business you were actively enraged in or in land ownership. Hands on ownership was the norm really until the mid-late 1800s. So opportunities for absentee investments were pretty limited and few wizards would get rich on hands on small businesses.
3) Investing wisely requires real skill. You are most successful when you understand the business and change your business strategy as the world changes. Few wizards would spend the significant amount of time required to understand the market -- and spend even more time each year to keep that understanding current. Add into this the fact that most wealth creation came from technology -- and wizards are horrible with technology. They are also unlikely to spot new trends in technology or recognize when a previously successful technology is no longer the wise investment.
Keep in mind we had multiple very serious recessions, major technology shifts, and other disruptions that could easily have destroyed all a wizard's investments if not managed correctly. And while it is true the wizard could have invested in very safe government bonds, the reality is that few government bonds were really safe prior to the 20th century (exception - Bank of England) and I am sure WWII also contributed to a lot of bad debt. Even if your bonds paid off, the safe ones rarely earned much after accounting for inflation. Such investments protected your fortune, they rarely "made" your fortune.
4) The wizard is not alone in using magic or investing in the long term. There are many supernatural races who are both long lived, have access to magic, perhaps have some ability to see the future, and would choose to invest. The White Council's own investments are a perfect example. What this means is that the wizard cannot rely upon magic to provide a major advantage, at least once investments become substantial. There is just too much competition who can play the same game.
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Anybody else see things differently?
1) Draw gold / precious stones out of the ground with geomancy.
2) Transmute coal into diamonds.
3) Affect horse/dog races with mind magic on the animals.
4) Affect sports events with good luck/bad luck spells.
5) Rob ATMs with invisibility and hexing.
Those are just the small stuff. Given a good ritual, a wizard could affect international companies or even countries. Most mass-produced goods should be thaumaturgically near-identical, company premises could be affected Little Chicago style, and businesses have no thresholds to protect them.
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I think the benefit of compound interest can be seriously oversold.
Agreed, but mostly it's oversold by Harry who is likely bad at moneytm, thinks of all investment as simple compound interest, and viewing things from his perspective as someone born in the 70's.
1) The person must first have wealth before they can invest wealth. ... So a ... middle class wizard is not going to be able to save enough money to create a small fortune through compound interest.
A wizard would have major advantages in generating the initial wealth. Historically, the middle class have been people who were relatively wealthy, i.e., not peasants, but not nobility. Prosperous farmers, skilled tradesmen, and merchants. Recently, middle class has come to mean people who are nether poor nor super wealthy, relatively. Most middle class people retire; they literally become independently wealthy. So middle class people would have always had the opportunity to gain financial independence.
2) investments were typically limited to ... in land ownership.
Which would probably have made most wizards extremely wealthy if they had invested in farmland outside of most major cities and didn't sell it off immediately as the population has exploded over the last two centuries.
3) Investing wisely requires real skill. You are most successful when you understand the business and change your business strategy as the world changes. Few wizards would spend the significant amount of time required to understand the market -- and spend even more time each year to keep that understanding current.
I'm sure most wizards have connections to wealth management, mostly through the White Council.
Add into this the fact that most wealth creation came from technology -- and wizards are horrible with technology.
It's only post WWII that the "side effect" of magic was interference with technology.
There is just too much competition who can play the same game [using magic to aid in wealth management].
I disagree. There isn't too much competition in the real world markets for people who simply want to protect their wealth, i.e., at least maintain their net worth relative to inflation.
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Counterpoint
A wizard would have major advantages in generating the initial wealth.
I agree that wizards can be wealthy, but there is nothing automatic about wealth generation. Wizards must spend an enormous amount of time learning magic. They need a lot of exotic and hard to get ingredients for potions and item creation. They have severe problems with technology. So unless they have some specialty of magic that is particularly useful for income generation, it is not likely they will become wealthy or even well off. Their focus is on their magic, leaving little time or attention for wealth creation. Serious wealth creation does take time and focus.
And while magic item creation can be lucrative, that is a skill that only develops late in life. Harry is exceptional in magic item creation (per WOJ) and is 40+ years old and he still cannot create items of power that last for any length of time (away from him) or that can easily be used by others. I suspect most wizards cannot make such items until they are well over a hundred.
2) investments were typically limited to ... in land ownership.
Which would probably have made most wizards extremely wealthy if they had invested in farmland outside of most major cities and didn't sell it off immediately as the population has exploded over the last two centuries.
Yes a wizard who waited until 2019 and sold his property in London would make a fortune if he bought it in 1700. But if he had sold it in 1730 I doubt he would have done more than break even. And wizards had to be careful about living too long in any one place, so few would have kept property in major cities for centuries. The vast majority of individual wizards holdings were no doubt in the country and unlikely to gain great value. Most wizards valued obscurity after all.
The major land owners were nobility - and most of them were impoverished when the modern age came about.
I'm sure most wizards have connections to wealth management, mostly through the White Council.
Why would you assume that? The company I work for does not give me insider investment advice nor carefully manage my investments. I am sure the White Council manages its own investments and uses them to benefit all the wizards. That it is the purpose of those investments. They are not going to manage the personal investments of individual wizards -- nor would most wizards give the council that level of control over their personal investments. The wizards are fiercely independent.
Add into this the fact that most wealth creation came from technology -- and wizards are horrible with technology.
It's only post WWII that the "side effect" of magic was interference with technology.
The vulnerability to tech began much earlier than WW II. It was certainly in place when trains were first created and that was early late 1700s/early 1800s.
There is just too much competition who can play the same game [using magic to aid in wealth management].
I disagree. There isn't too much competition in the real world markets for people who simply want to protect their wealth, i.e., at least maintain their net worth relative to inflation.
Ok I agree with this comment. My point from the beginning was that investments aided by magic were not going to be an easy source of wealth generation. But once that wealth was created, a wizard focused on managing investments could probably keep from loosing that wealth in the market.
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I agree that wizards can be wealthy, but there is nothing automatic about wealth generation.
See my comment from October 18 as to how there are many ways for wizards to become wealthy. I'm not saying that it would be automatic; just that over a normal lifetime or two, a wizard should be able to figure out a way to become independently to indecently wealthy and maintain that level of wealth. Also, it only takes one "big score" for someone to be wealthy.
Now, I'm not saying that every wizard is going to be super wealthy or even just wealthy. I am saying that if a wizard set out to be independently wealthy, they would have a lot of opportunities and shouldn't have too much trouble. Also, if they are making enough money at whatever they are doing to feed themselves to put money aside, they will eventually be wealthy. Sure, there are going to be some wizards who invest their entire fortune in some boondoggle and go broke. Most of those wizards would probably diversify the second (or third) time around. Generally speaking, older people have more wealth than younger people. I imagine that would be even more true for wizards.
Yes a wizard who waited until 2019 and sold his property in London would make a fortune if he bought it in 1700. But if he had sold it in 1730 I doubt he would have done more than break even. And wizards had to be careful about living too long in any one place, so few would have kept property in major cities for centuries. The vast majority of individual wizards holdings were no doubt in the country and unlikely to gain great value. Most wizards valued obscurity after all.
The major land owners were nobility - and most of them were impoverished when the modern age came about.
They wouldn't have to wait that long. The closer land is to a population center, the more valuable it is. Per woj, most wizards didn't like to travel to far. You stated they need rare and difficult to obtain items. That means they need to be located reasonably close to population centers or already be wealthy enough to have factors travel for them. So a wizard was likely to have their home outside of town far enough to be left alone, but close enough to go to town for supplies. As populations grew drastically in the 1800's then absolutely exploded in the 1900's, a wizard could have made a fortune by selling their land every 50 years or so to maintain their obscurity. Most wizards alive were born either in the modern era or the early modern era.
This could be true of Ebeneezer, one of the most senior wizards. He did live in Scotland. He came to the New World by the time of the French and Indian War. He ended up in Missouri living close enough to town to drive in for supplies.
Here are some population growth graphics: https://www.insider.com/graphics-showing-population-change-world-2019-7#10-this-graph-shows-how-the-worlds-population-is-estimated-to-hit-10-billion-in-2056-according-to-the-un-population-division-10 (https://www.insider.com/graphics-showing-population-change-world-2019-7#10-this-graph-shows-how-the-worlds-population-is-estimated-to-hit-10-billion-in-2056-according-to-the-un-population-division-10).
Why would you assume that?
I assume most have access to wealth management for several reasons. One being Harry stating that most older wizards have access to a good deal of wealth. The Paranet Papers state that many wizards are closer to Peabody's bureaumancy than combat magic. Rashid states that taking care of paperwork is a big favor for Harry.
The vulnerability to tech began much earlier than WW II. It was certainly in place when trains were first created and that was early late 1700s/early 1800s.
According to Jim Butcher, "Magic wasn't always screwing up post-WW2 tech. Before WW2 magic had other effects. It sorta changes slowly over time, and about every 3 centuries it rolls over into something else. At one time, instead of magic making machines flip out it made cream go bad. Before that magic made weird moles on your skin and fire would burn slightly different colors when you were around it."
https://dresdenfiles.fandom.com/wiki/Magic (https://dresdenfiles.fandom.com/wiki/Magic). That's why I assume that the change happened around WW2. (Also, I think it has been stated explicitly somewhere). It certainly wasn't screwing up post WW2 technology before WW2. It could be that the effect is "technology from the past 50 years," but we haven't seen any evidence that technology from the 50's is now immune from this effect.
My point from the beginning was that investments aided by magic were not going to be an easy source of wealth generation.
I don't think it would be easy for most wizards, but that it would be easy/not terribly difficult for a subset of wizards. My point was just different ways that different wizards could make a fortune or just a nest egg large enough to allow them to be idle after 50-100 years.
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I can't help but wonder how a mind wizard might be able to set up a heck of a business as a psychiatrist/councilor. It is only black magic to use mind magic if it is uninvited (i.e. invade). If a wizard has permission to alter your mind, it is technically legal, though it might still have negative effects on your sanity. I'm just wondering if they could advertise a 100% successful smoking prevention counseling. The fact that the councilor asks for permission to use magic to alter your mind would be laughed at and approved by most people who don't believe in magic...
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It is only black magic to use mind magic if it is uninvited (i.e. invade). If a wizard has permission to alter your mind, it is technically legal.
The treatments that the young wardens got in Turn Coat are probably examples of legal uses of mind magic. Also what Molly does when she senses peoples emotions. What Molly does would be useful for counseling or negotiating.
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The treatments that the young wardens got in Turn Coat are probably examples of legal uses of mind magic. Also what Molly does when she senses peoples emotions. What Molly does would be useful for counseling or negotiating.
Agreed about Molly's abilities being good for counseling. She might be a great lawyer if she can easily (noninvasively) read whether someone is lying, etc. Though in both cases knowing the truth or knowing how someone feels doesn't always help unless you know how and why they are trying to rationalize things, and what the root cause of something is. Knowing your patient is lying doesn't necessarily help you treat them.
What I was talking about was more like smoking cessation or something of that ilk where with their permission you go in and put in a magical block making it impossible to smoke, etc. Or maybe using magic to more reliably allow them to recall something from the past, etc.
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If I was a wizard in the DV, I would be one of the greatest criminals the world has ever seen.
Even just knowing how to navigate the Ways would be absolutely priceless. National borders become utterly meaningless when you can pop from Chicago to Edinburgh in a half hour. I could smuggle anything I wanted, steal whatever I wanted, and flee from the police at a moment's notice.
I wouldn't be an assassin or anything, but no bank vault would be safe from me.
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@Kindler: Right? I think I'd focus on ripping off drug dealers' cash houses. It would probably be like stealing candy from a baby. Use some supernatural means of finding cash houses. Tracking money you spend on drugs, having dew drop faeries find them, and probably a billion other ways. Use a veil to get in, use a sleep spell to put everyone to sleep, if the electronic devices haven't been fried already, hex them, then pack up the cash, and go. Rinse and repeat until you biggest money problem is laundering the money into the legitimate financial system.
Theoretically, you should be fine reporting the source of your income as theft because the government "can't" use that information against you, but word on the street is that the information gets to the law enforcement branches of the government. I imagine that you could just come right out and say that you got the money through wizardry.
The higher up any food chain you go, the more likely you are to run into someone who knows about the supernatural who can do something about it. We don't really know how high up in any organization you have to go up before they become wise to the supernatural, but it wouldn't shock me if most national organizations didn't know about the supernatural. It would shock me if most national orgs that have been around for some time didn't, at the very top levels, know about it. The head of the Chicago mob, at least one organization in the federal government, and one of about 400 Cook County judges all know about the supernatural. The Cubs are willing to pay a lot of money to get rid of a curse, so they probably know.
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about crime: keep in mind the supernatural is everywhere. As we've seen the red court and the white court run/ran a lot of the crime in the world as the red court ran prostitution in Chicago before Harry burned down their operation and Marcone took it over. Marcone now runs crime in Chicago and is supernaturally clued in. The Paranet papers imply that something supernatural runs Vegas. So getting involved in any of those things too much and you run the risk of attracting the ire of the supernatural forces that already make money off the operations.
Seeing as how Bob is a spirit of intellect, and under Butter's influence has connected and interacted with the internet, I would think that Bob could be (or a similar spirit or more) have already become "ghosts in the machine" that could know more and react more quickly than any human, and more effectively than any program. It seems like something like Bob would be the ultimate superfast day trader. So I wouldn't be surprised if you ran into the supernatural in high finance either.
I assume that if you kept your operations low - knocking over small banks once a month throughout the country, you probably wouldn't attract much attention. But try to just walz into verity trust in Chicago and make a killer score.... probably wouldn't go so well, and there might be similar places run by other supernatural entities throughout the world.
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... So I wouldn't be surprised if you ran into the supernatural in high finance either ...
I'm pretty sure the White Council IS one of the supernatural entities doing high finance. I suspect they are the preeminent one, or up in the top tier of "the very best."
I'm sure there are wizards whose talents lie in that direction, who benefit from being Council "insiders" so they don't have to worry about competitors/predators hitting them in areas where they're weaker. Support teams... investigators finding new opportunities, and finding problems to steer away from; security vs. other supernatural financial agents; intelligence finding weaknesses to exploit in other supernaturals; etc...
I presume Harry has put some of his/Maggie's newfound wealth into the White Council's investment arm (I presume he hasn't put all of it in!).
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Just for the record bank robbery is a good way to go broke. Welcome to the modern economy. Large piles of cash are a thing of the past. And good luck chasing drug money, high reward but very high risk.
I would personally research the thorn manacles and engineer some didn't involve pain, and then take some low risk path to wealth. Like be a doctor. My doctor has two corvettes, two Shelby GT's and an elevator in his garage. Earn it in the first hundred years and invest that for the next two. Buy real estate in major urban areas and go live on a farm next to Eb.
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That's too much work. I'd much rather simply steal it.
Australian authorities or drug kingpins aren't going to look for a thief chilling out in the United States. I could enchant something like Harry did in Small Favor to change my appearance, go in under a veil, hire a horde of faeries, or, failing all that, blow stuff up.
And yeah, most bank branches don't have piles of cash lying around. But most of the reasonably sized ones have at least 200k on hand. ATMs by themselves often have 50-100k inside. They're hard to open for someone who doesn't know magic.
Actually, fun story about that. A friend of mine worked in LP for Chase in our area. They hushed things up and it basically went entirely unreported, but there was a gang of thieves who managed to clear out ATMs at ten to twenty (the story changes and he gets skittish about giving details) different branches over a three month period. They never found them, and they walked away with anywhere from two to four million dollars. They cut through the roof, directly over the room behind the main bank ATMs. Didn't trigger any alarms, and since it's all 20s, there's no way to trace the cash.
That's the kinda thing you can do once every couple of years and live perfectly comfortably. A wizard could beat that performance.
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And good luck chasing drug money, high reward but very high risk.
I really don't see how it's high risk unless you're taking on a mob bank like Marcone's or something similar. I'm not talking about hitting a major cartel for a few million in one go. I'm talking about hitting a place with four guys and $200,000. The only risk I see about hitting a big stash house with millions of dollars is if they're wise to the supernatural. Mostly we see Harry do something under a time clock. When you plan on stealing millions, you can take a few months to plan it out. I'm pretty sure a wizard could figure out how to get away clean pretty easily if the victims didn't know anything about the supernatural. Also, I'm thinking burglary, not robbery.
That's too much work. I'd much rather simply steal it. ... since it's all 20s, there's no way to trace the cash.
Funny. If 20s are untraceable, that's the way to rob a bank. Otherwise, you'd have trouble laundering the cash.
A casino job might be a good way to go, but it would take a lot of research. You would probably want to steal money coming in from gamblers instead of money coming in from banks for the same reason you'd want to steal 20s.
On the flip side of crime, if these organizations are aware of the supernatural, a wizard could probably make a fortune preventing/investigating what we're talking about, which is basically what Harry does. Harry doesn't charge enough for his services. He charged $75 an hour in Blood Rites. The highest paid lawyers get $2,000 per hour and the average partners at big firms charge $875 per hour according to my first google result. There are a lot more lawyers than wizards. If someone needs to hire a wizard, the wizard can charge whatever the client can afford to pay up to the point that it isn't worth it to prevent the thefts. As we've seen in the books, even those part of the supernatural community often have no idea how to get in touch with a wizard. Harry and Elaine would be their only options.
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You only have to screw up once and you could be dead. And any house with 200k is going to be part of some larger criminal conspiracy. I'm not saying a wizard couldn't pull it off, but as Harry points out he is just as vulnerable to a bullet as you and me.
Consider it as a person who will live three hundred plus years. At 70 you are young, more or less equivilant to a mortal who is 25. Less than one quarter of your presumed life span. If you die before 100 you have lost a lot of life.
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I figure the risk, for a wizard who plans it out, is less than having a job that involves the frequent use of heavy machinery, including cars. Even if the organization is wise to the supernatural, how are they going to figure out who burgled them? In a good burgling, no one knows what happened until the burglar is long gone. It's not like this wizard is going to place an ad in the phone book. (And if it's that wizard who did, we've seen that he is maybe a little too comfortable with risk).
And if you spend a quarter of your life grinding to make your fortune, you've wasted a lot of life.
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To get back to the main point, it's going to be very hard for wizards to go grocery shopping in this day and age, let alone have any sort of common career. Computers are ubiquitous. We probably don't realize how common they are. If a wizard had a common career, he would need to go about it in a unique way.
I can't really think of any 9-5 a wizard could do that avoids technology.
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Honestly, the real problem is going to be maintaining a viable legal identity for tons of long-lived wizards. The IRS (or someone) is going to come a-knocking when you're 160 years old. Hell, you get a congratulatory letter from the Oval Office for living to be a hundred. It'd be kinda funny if Eb has a couple of them gathering dust in his study. "This one is from Grant. This one should have been from Kennedy, but I got it from LBJ, that jerk."
The point is that it used to be pretty easy to fake an identity. You used to be able to apply for a Social Security Number for newborns by mail, and there was virtually zero verification. Wizards could set things up a decade or three in advance and apply for the legal documents for their next identity, then wait until they look about the right age for the new one, and "kill" the old one, inheriting their own assets. No idea how they'd be able to manage it now, with the sheer volume of electronic recordkeeping necessary to even apply for that kind of thing. Peabody could've made an absolute killing if he wasn't a traitorous douche nozzle.
Harry's probably not thinking about things now, since I assume he assumes he's going to die young, but I'd imagine he'll start thinking about it with Maggie around.
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I imagine that the biggest problem with maintaining an identity would be if you were collecting social security long after you should be dead. Even if you were one of those people who always looked older than you were, as a wizard you would look way younger than 100+ when you were 100+. If the government decided to investigate your collection of social security, they'd be sure you weren't you. Otherwise, as long as you're paying taxes, the IRS is unlikely to investigate.
What do you need an identity for? Paying income taxes. Collecting government benefits. Travel. Buying booze. Buying guns. Getting credit? Any sort of licensing. Banking.
Plenty of that could be solved by getting id from, and banking in, a foreign country. Travel is already a problem, and the solution is to "cheat," as Dresden puts it, using the Ways. Then there's just breaking the law by not paying taxes, black market gun buying, and just not obtaining the "necessary" licensing. Trusts, llc's, lp's, corporations, and such would be very useful for a lot of these problems, but you would still run into tax/tax id problems.
All of this is probably moot because I think the White Council has paperwork for maintaining an id with the government. I base this on Rashid talking to Dresden about fixing his presumed dead situation with the government. I know that's a little different, but I assume the Council has procedures for this because the Council wants to maintain secrecy, and it has to be an issue that has been around for a while. I imagine it's the type of thing they want to stay on top of.
On the other hand, a lot this has only come up recently. Money laundering only became illegal in 1986, which is a much narrower thing than I previously thought, but there are all sorts of regulations that have come up after that to hinder money laundering and tax evasion that would get in the way of maintaining your official financial existence. Then a lot of new laws are coming into effect now to combat fake ids because of 9/11.
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One thing to note is that the "interference with technology" is just the current manifestation of the unpleasant side-effect of being a wizard. Per WoJ, before technology developed, that side-effect manifested differently, but still in ways that were inconvenient for the wizard and unpleasant for by-standers, and is a direct back-lash of "reality" against being warped or otherwise messed-with by wizards exercising their powers, and that back-lash has (again, per WoJ) been part of the price of *being* a wizard in this earthly reality- it's been a constant since the beginning.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that a bunch of these practical issues are much more Doylist than not.
If you WANT it to be easy, it's easy to justify. If you want it to be hard, it's easy to make it hard.
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I think the benefit of compound interest can be seriously oversold - at least as soemthing that provides real benefit to most wizards.
It requires several elements to be successful and all are problematic for wizards.
1) The person must first have wealth before they can invest wealth. Few people have the personality to sock away substantial resources today, so I cannot imagine the wizard population is filled with a hoard of atypical savers. So a poor or even middle class wizard is not going to be able to save enough money to create a small fortune through compound interest.
2) You must have something to invest "in". Stock or bond markets really did not exist before the 1600s and before that investments were typically limited to business you were actively enraged in or in land ownership. Hands on ownership was the norm really until the mid-late 1800s. So opportunities for absentee investments were pretty limited and few wizards would get rich on hands on small businesses.
3) Investing wisely requires real skill. You are most successful when you understand the business and change your business strategy as the world changes. Few wizards would spend the significant amount of time required to understand the market -- and spend even more time each year to keep that understanding current. Add into this the fact that most wealth creation came from technology -- and wizards are horrible with technology. They are also unlikely to spot new trends in technology or recognize when a previously successful technology is no longer the wise investment.
Keep in mind we had multiple very serious recessions, major technology shifts, and other disruptions that could easily have destroyed all a wizard's investments if not managed correctly. And while it is true the wizard could have invested in very safe government bonds, the reality is that few government bonds were really safe prior to the 20th century (exception - Bank of England) and I am sure WWII also contributed to a lot of bad debt. Even if your bonds paid off, the safe ones rarely earned much after accounting for inflation. Such investments protected your fortune, they rarely "made" your fortune.
4) The wizard is not alone in using magic or investing in the long term. There are many supernatural races who are both long lived, have access to magic, perhaps have some ability to see the future, and would choose to invest. The White Council's own investments are a perfect example. What this means is that the wizard cannot rely upon magic to provide a major advantage, at least once investments become substantial. There is just too much competition who can play the same game.
I like all of the points that you made, but I think you also have to consider the culture any given wizard came up with. Harry received some kind of public education, which would have taught him virtually nothing about how to handle money. When I was a senior in my high school, I took a class (I no longer remember if it was history or social studies) where the teacher finished the curriculum a week early. The last week of school he taught us how to balance a check book and how mortgages worked. Outside of learning math and how to punctuate; which I really didn't learn that well, it was probably the only useful thing I learned in any high school class I took. There should have been a year's worth of classes on personal finance and investments, in general.
Now older wizards like Ebenezer and the Merlin wouldn't have received any education unless they came from wealth. This would be especially true if their magical potential wasn't known. They also would have been born into a much harsher world. Those who survived would have been forced to learn how to survive in that world. Imagine a three hundred year old wizard who learned how business and finance worked in the eighteenth century, and who has seen every financial panic and full blown economic depression from then until now. Talk about learning the hard way. Now imagine that the White Council has several people like that working as financial advisers. I think they would be really, really good at their job.
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I wonder if we might be overthinking the difficult crime thing with major bank invasions and stuff. Why not just enchant an item that makes every one dollar bill you hand someone look like a 20 for two minutes after it leaves your hand, or something else reasonably "magically automated" to deceive people. Counterfeiting without magic might be too much work and too difficult with all the countermeasures, but with magic might be easy.
If you were ok with the morality of it and you could also do something like smuggle drugs using the NN. being able to go from somewhere central America to Chicago in half an hour with no border checks should make it easy to earn a bunch of money fast. If you want to go legit, just transport things back and forth to from Europe or America to Australia. There has got to be a way to make money physically transporting something in half an hour that would normally take days.
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I like all of the points that you made, but I think you also have to consider the culture any given wizard came up with. Harry received some kind of public education, which would have taught him virtually nothing about how to handle money. When I was a senior in my high school, I took a class (I no longer remember if it was history or social studies) where the teacher finished the curriculum a week early. The last week of school he taught us how to balance a check book and how mortgages worked. Outside of learning math and how to punctuate; which I really didn't learn that well, it was probably the only useful thing I learned in any high school class I took. There should have been a year's worth of classes on personal finance and investments, in general.
Now older wizards like Ebenezer and the Merlin wouldn't have received any education unless they came from wealth. This would be especially true if their magical potential wasn't known. They also would have been born into a much harsher world. Those who survived would have been forced to learn how to survive in that world. Imagine a three hundred year old wizard who learned how business and finance worked in the eighteenth century, and who has seen every financial panic and full blown economic depression from then until now. Talk about learning the hard way. Now imagine that the White Council has several people like that working as financial advisers. I think they would be really, really good at their job.
They teach that stuff here in New York in some districts. In mine, it was a required course, and there was a regents exam for it (meaning you have to retake the exam or the course if you fail). It focused on things like making and maintaining a budget, balancing a checkbook, filing taxes (and how taxes work in general), the differences between 1099s and W-2s/W-4s, how to apply for a job and the interview progress (like writing a resume or CV, how you're supposed to dress appropriately, etc.) the hierarchy of needs, and even things like how to study for an exam. It's a full-year course, too. Highly practical education. I think it's still a requirement in my old district. It fell under the business course credits. I remember it was one of two regents exams I got a perfect 100 on (it's not exactly rocket science, and I don't think anyone in my year (massive high school, I graduated with 1800 kids) failed it, but still).
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Random comments
Traveling via never-never can be a good way to travel the globe, but it can be very dangerous so you are pretty limited to the paths and routes. I can see the value for smuggling small high value items. And I suspect the routes that are safe are also controlled by the White Council - which would probably become aware and seriously annoyed if you make their paths part of your weekly drug smuggling run.
It would be extremely dangerous to try to use the never-never to get into bank vaults. Remember, the other side has to have an affinity. To get to a never-never spot that opens into a bank vault means you need to break into a never-never bank vault just to walk into a mortal bank vault. Not seeing how that is easier.
I suspect the White Council does help its members with identification issues. They have the expertise and contacts to make this work pretty easily and their members would be pretty clueless for the most part.
Robberies in general, especially robberies targeting illegal organizations like drug dealers or gangs require good intelligence and open you up to risk. After all, you physically have to enter their premises and take stuff. You have to collect intelligence - which might be noticed or wrong. And if you hit the same place multiple times, they will adapt. Small robberies minimize risk, but consume a lot of time per dollar gained. Large robberies get you a lot more cash, but require a lot more research and/or connections to make happen and a lot more danger when selling the goods (if not taking cash). And if your robberies are too spectacular, the wardens might get annoyed as they do like to keep mortals clueless about the presence of magic. Not a law of magic, but they can still make trouble for you.
I guess I am saying that crime is an approach that can work, but the wizard must be intelligent and skilled in how they go about it to manage the risk.
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Gathering intelligence is what wizards do, so that shouldn't be a problem. Also, why rob when you can burgle undetected?
As for the White Council being annoyed or interfering with illegal activity, they wouldn't. That's what Harry's mom objected to. Harry and Luccio have an entire conversation about why the Council doesn't do anything as long as the practitioner isn't violating the laws of magic.
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Most banks aren't prepared for a magical assault. A wizard could walk in under a veil or an illusion, hold the place up, step into the bathroom, and come out through a Way that takes him a thousand miles away in minutes.
The point is that you can escape REALLY easily. Mortal authorities will not be able to catch you unless you're careless or stupid. And, if you're a wizard-level talent (assuming you'd have to be in the first place), nobody would even know who was responsible in the first place. Hell, I'd make an illusion based on my worst enemy and wear a nametag. "My name is Sally Fields, and I am here to rob you. Also, I'm a horrible racist!" News headline:
"SALLY FIELDS ROBS BANK IN BRAZEN HEIST, DISAPPEARS WITHOUT A TRACE"
"RACIST ASSAULT BY SALLY FIELDS ENDS IN $250,000 STOLEN IN DAYTIME ROBBERY"
Gangs would be even simpler. Just go in disguised as a rival gang member. Put tracking spells on whoever you have to to find out where they keep cash. And it's not like they're going to call the cops. I mean, crap, we saw Gatekeeper put everyone but Harry to sleep across water, at the drop of a hat. If I could do that, there is pretty much nothing anyone could do to stop me. If I couldn't, I'm sure I could learn enough evocation to get it done. If I couldn't do that, it's all about trickery and illusion. If I couldn't do that, I'd shanghai some faeries into getting the cash for me.
There are so many options that it makes me wonder why there aren't more wizardly criminals.
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I have a very parochial view on this. A thief is a thief. When you steal something there is always a victim. I suspect if there were wizards, they would follow the lead of most of the human race and not be thieves. And if wizards would steal from mortals, then sooner or later they would steal from other wizards. Thieves are like that.
And in the Dresdenverse just because most mortals don't believe in magic doesn't imply that none do. Too many wizard thieves would sooner or later draw attention to what they were doing and someone would make it their business to make them stop. They might not care about murder and mayhem by the Reds, but get into their wallet and someone will bleed.
In terms of job opportunities, the Council runs a shadow government so wizard civil service is an option. How many people does it take to make HQ function, much less satellite offices.
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Too many wizard thieves would sooner or later draw attention to what they were doing and someone would make it their business to make them stop.
I'm not suggesting a wizard be a career thief. Just burgle a million dollars or so from criminals. After that, one should be able to invest that money in income producing property and live well enough off of that, especially if the wizard does the occasional "wizard" job.
Other ways to make money:
Treasure Hunting: I think someone mentioned finding and recovering shipwrecks. But we don't need to limit it to shipwrecks. Any sort of ancient sites or treasures could be found by wizards when scientists couldn't otherwise. Even locating archaeological/paleontological sites that don't have any "treasure" would be a valuable service someone would be willing to pay for.
Bounty Hunting/Informing: Simple bail jumpers to those $25 million bounties the U.S. government places on terrorists. This could obviously get pretty dangerous, but the great thing about those $25 million (and a lot of crime informing) bounties is that you only have to provide information. Depending on your sources, this could be easy and safe or dangerous and hard.
My brother has proposed making or recruiting spirits of intellect and selling them to wizards so they (the recruited spirits and the wizards) could have access to the internet. The "making" them is based on Evil Bob's existence. I'm not so sure that's an easy or feasible thing to do, but I'm also not sure it isn't. The recruiting is based on enticing them with access to "all human knowledge," i.e., the internet.
Cheating at casino's is something suggested, indirectly, by the text. There's a line in one of the descriptions of Mac's about a practitioner who has "enough kinetomancy to" cheat at dice. With $139, one could place three bets on a roulette wheel and make about $400,000. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roulette#Full_completes/maximums (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roulette#Full_completes/maximums). Betting $139 on a single 35 to 1 bet yields $5,004. A second 35 to 1 bet of $1,000 (the table maximum according to some gambling website) yields another $35,000. A $40,000 "complete bet" yields 392,000. I imagine their are other ludicrous bets to be made with similar results on other games of chance. There are several accounts of people using math and engineering to legally take casinos for over at least million (either dollars, pounds, or euros), and that's just on the roulette page I linked to. I don't know how long, and for how much, you could gamble before getting into one kind of trouble or another, but you could definitely make enough to live comfortably, if not extravagantly. I'm not sure if this would work in the DF because Vegas is a very supernatural city according to the Paranet Papers.
If you could make somewhat accurate predictions of the future that are only occasionally perfectly accurate, you could make playing the lottery a no lose situation and would eventually hit the jackpot.
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I'd say a lot of wizards don't really need to "make a living." Remember that Harry's situation is unusual, if not unique -- many wizards come from long bloodlines, with strong family ties that go from generation to generation, building upon the previous generations' assets.
A wizard doesn't have to worry about the day to day if the dividends from investments his grandfather made back in the 30s already pay for his house.
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I don't think we have a large enough sample of wizards to know if they come from wealth. But we do have Harry's statements that older wizards have money.
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In the old days, being able to instantly communicate long-distance would easily let you make a killing. It'd be even better if you could guarantee your ships would always make port (or that other ships didn't), though I think the anti-tech field would make sailing a high-risk activity for a wizard. Divination would let you time the market exactly, cashing out the day before the crash and re-investing at the market's lowest ebb would make obscene amounts of money.
If nothing else, the discipline required to become a wizard is an excellent transferable skill if the wizard can find the time to devote to some other craft.
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Near the end of Ch.41 in Proven Guilty, as Harry is enumerating Molly's options going forward, he mentions offhand, "I've heard of a couple of wizards who have made stupid amounts of money with their skills."
No details as to which skills, or how the money was made. I presume it wouldn't have been dangerous, illegal, or immoral -- otherwise, Harry wouldn't have suggested it to Molly!
Also, Harry is notoriously distant from the White Council, both formal operations and the social/gossip network. If even a relative outsider like Harry knows of "a couple" of wizards, I'm sure there are others; and similarly, if there are a few making "stupid" amounts of money, I bet many more are satisfied making merely "silly" amounts.
I think we can take this as part of DF canon.
It doesn't really answer the OP on the point of "how" its done. For that, I think it will probably come down to, "However Jim wants it to, if it ever becomes relevsnt to any of his stories," and/or "However YOU want it to, if you write DF fanfic -- or have a DFA/DFRPG game -- where it becomes relevant."
;D
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In the old days, being able to instantly communicate long-distance would easily let you make a killing. It'd be even better if you could guarantee your ships would always make port (or that other ships didn't).
For basically the entire time your talking about, just knowing which ships are not going to make it into port would be extremely valuable. Also, the anti-tech field wasn't in play until after WWII.
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presumably, they can find a few gold nuggets or diamonds or whatever without having to sift through 50,000 tons of rock first
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For basically the entire time your talking about, just knowing which ships are not going to make it into port would be extremely valuable. Also, the anti-tech field wasn't in play until after WWII.
I was thinking of the principle behind the anti-tech field, which is the natural order being grumpy at wizards. Fouling rigging or rotting planks seems like a reasonable inference of the effect that curdles milk.
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I think the benefit of compound interest can be seriously oversold
It really can't be. If a wizard invests $5,000 in the year 1900 - about the average cost of a house at the time - simply in the S&P 500 index it would be worth just over $2.5 million today, and the wizard would be our equivalent of 30 years old. This would assume they add nothing more through the years (which they probably would). And even that's only an annualized return of like 5% or so- if they had any sort of active management (according to dresden at least, they have armies of investment personnel), that amount could easily double.
Compound interest is a very real and very powerful thing.
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It really can't be. If a wizard invests $5,000 in the year 1900 - about the average cost of a house at the time - simply in the S&P 500 index it would be worth just over $2.5 million today, and the wizard would be our equivalent of 30 years old. This would assume they add nothing more through the years (which they probably would). And even that's only an annualized return of like 5% or so- if they had any sort of active management (according to dresden at least, they have armies of investment personnel), that amount could easily double.
Compound interest is a very real and very powerful thing.
Yeah.
I presume the WC's financial arm serves as a bank for any wizards who care to invest with them (and I presume most do). I mean, the wizards are free to invest with JPMorgan, or CreditSuisse, or any other muggle financiers (instead, or as well). A fair number probably do so, to "diversify."
But if the WC has "armies" (even if only a dozen or so people) of investment experts... I'm guessing can they produce truly extraordinary results.
The thing I just realized is that MANY wizards probably get their seed money working for the WC. Maybe crafting an item or two (or more) or doing over work-for-pay (like the "investment personnel," for example?)... and what do they do? They give the money back to the WC, to hold and invest! The WC gets the fruits of their labor, AND gets to hold a bunch of that capital (& the benefits of leveraging it) only actually turning over money to meet the wizard's immediate needs!
The WC must be one of the financial juggernauts of the world. Hell, maybe a bunch of those "muggle" financial houses are just fronts for WC finances...
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I was thinking of the principle behind the anti-tech field, which is the natural order being grumpy at wizards. Fouling rigging or rotting planks seems like a reasonable inference of the effect that curdles milk.
But the principle isn't a general murphyonic field. It's always a pretty specific one. Post WWII tech, milk curdling, skin problems. As an aside, I'm pretty sure at some point it's mentioned that candle flames burning green in a wizard's presence was a thing. I'm not sure how that would have anything to do with a "what can go wrong, will go wrong" effect.
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I'm assuming the historical examples we have are not the only symptoms. It's not so much that things are going wrong but that reality is disordered near the wizard. Ships are particularly vulnerable to disorder.
Wrecking the ship they're sailing on also seems thematically appropriate.
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I can see where you're getting that, but I strongly disagree.
Most of the examples are real world examples of ways to identify witches. The current one is just Jim's answer to "what's a good way to stop every situation from being solved with a cell phone." I don't know where the candle one comes from. (I did find which book it's from. Ghost Story).
There is no suggestion anywhere in the books or any WoJ I've seen/heard of that the effects are anything other than the stated effect for that period.
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Harry describes himself as a "thug" early on.
Presumably the stay-at-home wizards are much better at all kinds of wards, enchantments, illusions, veils, shape changing, astral projection, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, thaumaturgy, shapechanging, whatever.
although gold is a completely differently element than lead, precious stones like diamonds and emeralds are just common elements arranged a certain way. maybe they can do that with magic. transmutation.
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They might even be able to transmute base metals into gold. Scientists have turned lead into gold. "Nuclear experiments have successfully transmuted lead into gold, but the expense far exceeds any gain." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation).
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Antique Rackets- Highlander Style.
Although given how many immortals there are, I assume antiques are less valued in the supernatural community.