How do Wizards make a living?

[dspringer1]

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. 

[Bad Alias]

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.

[Kindler]

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.

[morriswalters]

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.

[Bad Alias]

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. 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.

[Mr. Death]

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.

[Bad Alias]

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.

[noblehunter]

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.

[g33k]

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."

 

[Bad Alias]

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.

[zetadog]

presumably, they can find a few gold nuggets or diamonds or whatever without having to sift through 50,000 tons of rock first

[noblehunter]

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.

[smalenchak]

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.

[g33k]

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...

[Bad Alias]

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.