Symbols for British wizarding currency. Thoughts about how a magical economy might function, and the assumptions that go into that, as well as speculation about the role that Gringotts plays in all of this (and why it plays that role at all).
The Price of Transfiguration: How the magical economy handles the existence of (canonically permanent) transfiguration.
A Matter of Sport: Different figures on the number of Quidditch players in Magical Britain, how many of them are professional players (and what that might mean in a magical economy), and how less-popular sports might function.
My own thinking, just to get it out of the way, is that the magical economy is radically different from the muggle economy:
1.1 Transfigurations are generally permanent, so the supply of materially-finished goods is limited to the ability of an individual wix to transfigure those goods.
1.2 Even assuming that personal talent (both creative and magical) determines the quality of a set of transfigured robes, this still means that “magical manufacturing” is very different to muggle manufacturing.
1.3 Anti-Theft Charms exist in canon, and we can easily suppose the existence of other enchantments, perhaps to prevent staining, extend use-life, and so forth. All, or almost all, goods in the magical world are enchanted in this way.
1.4 Magic (and magical properties) cannot be created through transfiguration, so you cannot transfigure a stone into a unicorn tail.
1.5 Therefore, when you buy an item in Diagon Alley, you are paying for (1) the creative and magical craftsmanship required to produce the item, (2) the cost of any magical components which might exist, and (3) any enchantments which were laid upon the item.
2.1 If transfigurations are not permanent (which is the case in many fanfics), then the shape of the economy is still distorted by the way that wixes can enchant objects to move on their own, permitting a degree of automation whose only bottlenecks are (1) the number of tools which a wix can animate at a given time and (2) the rate at which a near-finished item can be enchanted and thereby completed.
2.2 Despite the impossibility of transfiguring non-food into food, the ability to animate even a single tool at one time would have a dramatic effect on farming. Imagine, for example, being able to plow a field without relying on animal power, or enchanting a bag of seeds to float over a feed and scatter its contents across the furrows.
In “Lady Archimedes,” by White_Squirrel, there is a tax on extra wands.
The symbol ʛ is canonically used to refer to galleons. There are symbols for sickles and knuts as well, but they don't exist in unicode. ⨎ (or ʢ) and ⁂ (or ∴ or ⸫) are sorta close to the canonical symbols, though. For reasons unknown to me, wemyss used Γ., ſ., and ĸ. for galleons, sickles, and knuts.
One downside to bimetallic currencies is that people can profit from exploiting the difference between the exchange rate of the two currencies and the actual availability of the substances which are converted into those currencies. If we allow for a strong distinction between plain gold and gold galleons, however, then solving this problem is straightforward, however: goblins make galleons (and sickles and knuts); goblin magic can distinguish between goblin-made galleons and galleons of another provenance; and goblins make galleons, sickles, and knuts in amounts that are proportionate to the exchange rate.
“Gnomes are from Zurich, Goblins are from Vienna,” by wemyss, presents a common view of Gringotts and the economy: the bank has a full reserve, engages only moderately in loan services if it engages at all, charges for security vaults, takes a cut of the money that it mints, and perhaps makes a profit from other activities.
The second chapter of “What's in a Name: Headcanons and Geekery,” by LadyAramisGrey, discusses the galleons-to-pounds exchange rate, possibly goblin uses for muggle currency, (the relative lack of) inflation, and prices, prices, more prices, and wages. It suggests the nonexistence of a property tax but possibly taxes for inheriting property or converting muggle property to magical property, and that apothecaries might also stock spices and ingredients for cooking meals as well as for brewing potions. There's also some interesting discussion about the Weasleys and Dobby, with respect to wages and cost of living.
Overall, the cost of monthly living for a wizard or witch who owns property but potentially doesn't have a comprehensive garden or livestock would appear to be around 80ʛ 8ʢ 8⸫ (food + basic clothing/2 outfits and cloak + transport/2 daily trips + entertainment). Double it for a spouse. Add another 45 monthly galleons for food and clothing with each child and an extra hundred galleons for every child sent to Hogwarts. [...]
Minimum wage to survive on our calculated monthly cost of living could be as low as 50ʛ per month (12-13ʛ/week) but the ideal average would be around 20ʛ/week. Naturally if you don't own property and are renting in the London Wizarding District, you would probably prefer a higher wage. [...]
Using this as a model, I would say one galleon is equivalent to about £10 to £12 or about $16 to $20 USD in 2020 money based on equivalent items in the US and the UK. This would make a sickle (1ʢ), which is 0.05882 of a galleon, equivalent to about £0.65 or $1.06, and a knut (1⸫), which is 0.002028 of a galleon would be somewhere in the range of £0.02 or $0.04 USD.
“Gold & Silver Coinage in Fantasy/Medieval RPGs” gets into the metallic currency exchange rates for various cultures from 3,000 BC to the modern era, with suggestions for exchange rates in fantasy RPGs. If you want to do something special with the Wizarding economy, it may be worth a read.
“Wizarding Money and Exchange Rate,” by Owl Post, converts Magical British prices into USD and GBP, both at the value at that time and a later, inflation-adjusted value in 2017, and uses two exchange rates: Rowling's canonical exchange rate and a common canonical exchange rate.
Muggles pay for a number of things when they purchase something: the raw material, the effort and expertise required to obtain that material and transform it into the end product, and other bullshit like advertising. From this perspective, it's arguable that the magical economy is (contrary to what I've said earlier) actually not all that different from the muggle economy.
Transfiguration doesn't seem to be strongly limited by the relative sizes of the target object and what you intend to transform it into, but most “thing-to-thing” transfigurations involve objects of approximately similar size and it does appear that transfiguration of larger objects is harder than the transfiguration of smaller objects. I think it's reasonable to conclude that increasing the mass of an object through transfiguration, while not impossible, is more difficult than a transfiguration which involves no change in mass. On the same principle (“What can we reasonably infer, even if it wasn't spelled out and Rowling possibly didn't mean to imply it?”), it is easier to perform transfigurations between objects that are more similar to each other.
In fact, we could use similarity as a general underlying principle: two objects of the same size are similar in mass (or spatial dimensions, depending on how you'd like to define size), and objects may also be similar in terms of both being organisms, or felines, or housecats (this seems strongly implied but I don't remember whether it was made explicit in the books). The greater the number of points of similarity, and the greater the degree of similarity in each case, the simpler the transfiguration, with the simplest possible operation being a transfiguration of an object into itself. The upshot is that most materials will be transfigured from a simpler substance, but wixes won't just transfigure everything from dirt (or even the air).
Let's introduce another principle: it is easier to duplicate an object than to create a new one. Canonically, duplicates produced from the Doubling Charm are imperfect, and decay more quickly even if they are not immediately distinguishable from the original. You can choose to take this and run with it, but if you want to allow for physically perfect duplicates then there's another option, courtesy of “Potter Who and the Wossname's Thingummy,” by ForrestUUID:
“Those coins of yours. My dad finally got the Wixell tests back. If you want to sell them, he'll buy them. The Fugio cent has a duplicate somewhere, which cuts its value except to the owner of the other. The dime is unique.”
“What are Wixell tests?”
“Nodality — that's a transfigurational copy check — grade enhancement illusion and…well, no offense, you found them, if you can't trust Harry Potter who can you trust, but he had to verify they weren't stolen by somebody else.”
It should also be noted that conjuring or transfiguring “magic” appears to be impossible, which is to say that you can only obtain the exact effect of a particular spell by casting that spell. This is why, despite the difficulty of hunting Demiguises, high-quality Invisibility Cloaks are produced from actual Demiguises rather than by transfiguring other objects into Demiguise hides. This being so, it's probably also the case that specific animals will be raised for parchment (and other things) in order to exploit magical qualities that are easier to obtain by this process than by laying enchantments.
Wixell Tests work pretty well for my personal canon, which permits (at least in theory) the perfect duplication of anything, even food (as Hermione explains in DH, you can increase the quantity of food if you've got some) and “quantity” is just another characteristic of an object, like color or mass, that can be altered through transfiguration. Because an object whose quantity has been altered is still one object (just with multiple physical instances), they still have a metaphysical connection that a Wixell Test could take advantage of.
Thrifty wixes probably won't care whether their coat is a duplicate, but you can be sure that the Malfoys have a Certificate of Uniqueness (Certificate Sui Generis?) for every last item in their possession, and even if you don't go that far, it's probably a low-class sort of thing to intentionally purchase duplicated goods (The price difference probably isn't as much as you imagine. If it's impossible to produce a magical property simply through transfiguration or duplication then each duplicated item will have to be enchanted just the same as the original, so you're only saving on the physical craftsmanship of the piece).
Clothing might have any of the following enchantments:
Shoes might be charmed to keep their shine, and bear a Self-lacing Charm.
If we assume that there are 20,000 wixes in Britain and that only professional Quidditch players qualify as “professional athletes,” then there are 91-182 professional Quidditch players in the British and Irish Quidditch League (thirteen teams, each with seven players and an unknown number of reservists, who may or may not be merely semiprofessional). For comparison, there were roughly 12,600 professional athletes in the United Kingdom in 2010, or 0.46% vs 0.02% of their respective populations.
In other words, the relative proportion of professional athletes in Magical Britain is twenty-three times greater than in the United Kingdom, and we can assume that the difference is that much greater if we count other kinds of athletes besides Quidditch players. There are two non-mutually exclusive explanations for the imbalance:
In either case, if you really want to dig into this side of Magical Britain, then it may be worth looking at professional players of less-popular games, like chess, fencing, and Scrabble, where overall incomes are lower and often depend on winning competitions (the worst professional football team to compete in the World Cup still gets paid, but the fourth-best fencer to compete in the World Championship gets nada). It's not uncommon for these players to reside in places with a low cost of living or even to be fully itinerant as they travel from one competition to another. Chess players can also make money from appearance fees, sponsorships, writing, coaching, working in related organizations, and acquiring scholarships and stipends, most of which are also options for Quidditch players.
I don't spend much time on this aspect of dueling, but in my series “There is Nothing to Fear,” professional duelists expect to compete at least throughout Europe, and when Tom Riddle embarks on a Grand Tour of the world following his graduation from Hogwarts, his itinerary is influenced by the dueling circuit, a pretty well-worn set of dueling competitions whose location and timing take into account the need to give duelists from one competition enough time to travel to the next. There are regional and global circuits, and the regional circuits aren't in sync with each other, but they're all synced with the global circuit.
Amid all this talk of sport teams and demographics, it is worth noting that Liechtenstein has seven professional football teams, despite a population just shy of 40,000 (though it is also worth noting that these teams regularly play in neighboring Switzerland).
Ireland
Colorators applied color , especially to textiles or black-and-white photographs (these are separate occupations with similar objectives and the same name). Other names include dexter (textiles), faker (photographs), and tinter (either). The dyes might be prepared by a color-witch or color-wizard.
Fly coaches were hired by the hour, and glass coaches by the day. I like the idea of generalizing this to e.g. glass-wizards are laborers who are hired and paid by the day, and might be called glass-dockers, etc., according to their line of work.
Lamp exhausters drained the air from lightbulbs, back when that was a thing that had to be done. Perhaps the magical sort interfere with Muggle devices.
In Muggle history, owlers smuggled wool or sheep between England and France, but magical owlers should probably smuggle owls. Other smugglers were called smugsmiths.
People who sold goods door-to-door or on the street (usually from carts or stalls) were called hawkers, higglers (perhaps from “haggle”), hucksters (or huxters), and peddlers. Hucksters got their modern poor reputation because they were known to sell cheap, even shoddy goods. Sellers of produce were also called costermongers and greengrocers,
The term “hawker” and the suffix “-monger” were used broadly for sellers of certain goods, i.e. fish was sold by fish hawkers and fishmongers. Presumably, a seller of hawks was a hawk hawker. The -monger suffix often has a negative connotation: we talk of rumormongers and whoremongers today, but not of truthmongers, and we do talk of “peacemongers,” but usually not in a complimentary way. The place where the -monger sells their goods is a -mongery, i.e. fishmongery, ironmongery. “Lightmongers” installed rather than sold lighting.
First of all, we know that there are people in the service industry, such as bartenders, servers, and waiters; store staff, such as cashiers and saleswixes; and there are people involved in communication and journalism, like broadcasters, columnists, and photographers. There are enough actors for a Wizarding Academy of Dramatic Arts, and there are comedians, dancers, musicians, and other entertainers, as well as special effects wixes who work in the theater.
There are also people involved in the making and selling of brooms, who we might call (in old-fashioned terms) broom squires and broom dashers, respectively. There are farmers, who grow plants for potion-supplies, as well as trees for broomsticks and wands. There are tutors for magical children not yet old enough to go to Hogwarts, and there may be tutors for that subset of children who never go to Hogwarts. There are Healers; and there are mediwitches or mediwizards, who may be the same thing, or a subset specializing in traumatic injuries or first response.
Magenta Cornstock was an “experimental artist,” and this probably just means “artist who did weird stuff,” but there are talking portraits and moving photographs, so perhaps it could also involve actual research and experimentation. In any case, there are other researchers as well: Aurologists (who, in the film canon, study auras), Dragonologists, and Herbologists among them.
The terms “mechanic” and “technician” feel awfully Muggle, but they point to occupations that would have a presence in Magical Britain and I think it would be useful to have a general term for somebody that maintains and repairs objects of a magical nature. Right now I like mystician, which sounds like “magician” and implies an initiation into secret lore (the sacred mysteries of installing and repairing magical HVAC systems).
The OE defines arcanist as "a person who has knowledge of a secret process of manufacture.” The Old English “hellruna” referred to a person who performed necromancy, speaking with the dead for the purpose of divination; today, the term would be hellrune.
There's certainly a need for magical pest exterminators.
British wizards like their watches and clocks, so there are probably people who specialize in making clocks and watchers (I like the term “horologer”).
On Reddit, Shadeplant suggested the “Spell Un-do-er,” who identifies (and possibly fixes or removes) enchantments that the average person can't handle or identify, e.g. “figure out what spells are on the new teapot you bought or what your grandmother did to the kitchen cabinets.” I like it because of all the hyphens. Darsynia proposed the “Environment Installer,” a magical HVAC technician who might install a cool breeze in the spring and then remove it when winter comes.
In the “Victoria Potter” series by the Artist Formerly Known as Taure, there are several magical platforms at King's Cross: Platform 7 ½ (to Constantinople, in 1991), Platform 8 ½ (to Hogwarts, in 1992), and Platform 9 ¾ (to Hogwarts, in 1991; to Tromsø, in 1992). I like this, because trains are great and there should be more of them. It also provides another method of international travel and gives Platform 9 ¾ something more to do when the Hogwarts Express isn't running.
Taure's personnel breakdown of the Ministry of Magic provides a great many jobs, some of which probably have counterparts in Magical Britain's private sector: Dogsbodies are administrative assistants. Welcome witches are secretaries. Charm-masons, curse-weavers, and jinx-layers lay, maintain, and update enchantments of various kinds.
In “Potter Who and the Wossname's Thingummy,” by ForestUUID, mention is made of the “rod squads” or “Sensitive Wand Acquisition Teams,” which are like a bomb disposal unit, “only magic, and with a psychologist on board.” Touching a wand that isn't yours can be dangerous, especially if its owner was dangerous. The Ministry doesn't always want to just destroy a dangerous wand, though, because wands have personalities and memories and you can learn a lot about a person from their wand. There is also a reference to “hexicographers,” who presumably compile spellbooks analogously to lexicographers.
In “Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment,” by Inverarity, we're told about Historicists, who sometimes use Time-turners in order to personally observe the past, although the exact method is a little complicated and involves other practices that are left mostly undescribed.
In “Birds of a Feather,” by babylonsheep, a young Tom Riddle describes the respectability of different careers in the 1930s:
"The top tier of jobs after completing Hogwarts includes any position in the Ministry of Magic, St. Mungo's, or joining professional Quidditch. The first-string team is best, but no one will look down on a player fresh out of school making the reserves," said Tom. He held up a hand as Hermione's mouth opened to argue; neither of them thought very much of the most popular wizarding sporting pastime, and to consider it top tier was, to them, sheer absurdity. "These are what the Hogwarts authorities, or Professor Slughorn at least—and most people count him a good judge of these things—consider good, well-paying occupations for school leavers. And it's," he added, as if the words left a bad taste in his mouth, "socially respectable."
"The middle tier," Tom continued, "is shop work. Manning a counter in Diagon Alley, clerking in the back, or filling orders at an apothecary or haberdashery. It wouldn't be so bad if the shop work came with an apprenticeship with one of the better proprietors, but how often does someone like Ollivander offer one to those outside his immediate family? The positions at Gringotts Bank are also considered second tier even though I hear the pay is on a level or higher than what the Ministry's offering, but everyone knows that the place is run by goblins, and that's nowhere near as respectable as working for proper wizards and witches.
"The last and least tier—and I must profess I agree with Slughorn on this count—is magical menial labour," said Tom with a sniff of disdain. "Farming and harvesting potions ingredients, dissecting salamanders and lionfish for parts, or breeding and raising magical creatures. Half of it's work you can't even use a wand for, because of the ridiculous special requirements like 'cut by a silver knife by the light of a sickle moon', or 'plucked in a maiden's palm on the first day of spring'. Nevertheless, it's work even the meanest halfwit can do, with or without a single N.E.W.T."
If you’re wondering what jobs a werewolf can hold down, there are two things worth keeping in mind:
Tutors have the freedom to set eccentric schedules, but most werewolves won’t have a complete Hogwarts education, much less a Muggle education. If Lupin earned an Astronomy N.E.W.T., however, then he could probably set his own rates: a maths tutor will always be in high demand, and even premodern astronomy requires geometry and trigonometry. Fluency in Latin is another skill with cross-world appeal, and somebody as well-read as Lupin might also get by as an English tutor. Remote work of any kind is often a godsend for the chronically ill, but there isn’t much space for that in the 1990s. Freelance jobs like bookkeeping, editing, photography, and writing would fit this niche, however.
Undocumented immigrants in the United Kingdom most often work in construction, food preparation (e.g. bar and kitchen staff), hospitality (e.g. housecleaning), manufacturing (e.g. factory work), personal care (e.g. childcare, hairstyling, nursing), transport and storage (e.g. warehouse work). They are likelier than other people to work night shifts and jobs with short contracts and/or uncertain hours.
In any event, it’s also possible to set up as a “sole trader,” or self-employed businessperson, though an undocumented wix will need to deal solely in cash. If they’re discreet and their business looks small, however, then they’re unlikely to attract serious attention. Criminal activity is also an option for the right kind of werewolf, though it’s probably the case that the Ministry of Magic will come down on anyone who rely too much on magic to get by in the Muggle world, regardless of whether the activity is otherwise legal. Even if an ordinary wix could get away with cleaning Muggle houses with a Scouring Charm, the Ministry probably won’t give any benefit of the doubt to a werewolf. Honestly, working in the Muggle world at all might not be allowed, on the grounds that werewolves are inherently a risk to the Statute of Secrecy or some shit like that.
Other jobs which I have seen a Remus Lupin hold down: actor (generally in a background role) or stagehand, bartender, and private detective.