In this paper, we analyze the economic structure of the world of wizards as depicted in the Harry Potter books, which we term Potterian economy, and offer an economist’s perspective on it. We look at the economic structure of the life of Harry Potter and his co-actors as an economic model that governs the social organization of their economic activities. Our goal is to study and understand the internal consistency of the Potterian economic model and explore the relationships between its assumptions and the situation in the real world, as reflected in the Potterian model. To accomplish this, we focus on a textbook version of Solow’s economic growth model, which economists often use for studying the process of nations’ income determination and which serves as a standard benchmark for comparative economic growth studies. The analysis of the Potterian economy reveals that the Potterian model fits quite well the predictions of the economic growth model. We discuss potential implications of this finding, and explore the link between Potterian economic structure and performance in a broader context by discussing the link between economic institutions and economic outcomes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics, Emory University (Atlanta) in its series Emory Economics with number
0702.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: