wizardry and autarky

[marycatelli]

One wonders how much of a generalist a wizard could be as wizardry advances.  Enough to support himself?

After all, the advance of technology has been the advance of specialization and limitation of one's skill in other areas.  John Keats, lamenting the losses from the good old days of Robin Hood, included,

And if Marian should have
Once again her forest days,
She would weep,. . .
She would weep that her wild bees
Sang not to her—strange! that honey
Can't be got without hard money!

because of course the natural thing is to be able to track down the hives and get the honey yourself.

And except for a few specialized craftsmen, you could do all your own things. You might trade because you lacked equipment, or to get better stuff, or merely because you were better at something else, but you could manage on your own.

Many fantasy wizards are able to cope with everything. That would have interesting effects on the economy if wizardry spread.

Comments

[ford-prefect42.livejournal.com]

Reading this in a "labor market" context, based on the "able to support yourself" phraseology.

There are a number of factors that go into "pay rate". Specialized knowledge is only one of them, there are also working conditions, risk, "vision", specific suitability, and a *horde* of other factors. For instance, in context, a wizard with only basic spellcasting skills might be paid very well indeed to go on adventures with low probability of success, large hardships, toward speculative goals. Much like many college students are paid several thousand dollars per week to work on fishing boats in Alaska.

The hardest of these to economically account for is "vision". Brin and Page, of Google fame got where they are primarily for having the vision to hide the ads, sponsored content, etcetera until AFTER the "go" button had been pressed. and to present ads, sponsored content, etcetera that had *some* applicability to what the user was looking for at that moment. On the strength of that vision, they made tens of BILLIONS of dollars. Even the rankest generalist in terms of knowledge CAN make a shockingly large impact (with commensurate pay) IF their vision takes them to the right uncharted waters.

In science and engineering, one of the things that eventually becomes obvious is that it's almost *never* the established hyper-specialized experts that really make breakthroughs. Those guys carefully and methodically chart the length and breadth of the breakthroughs made by rare flashes of genius on the parts of (most often) outsiders or novitiates to the field. So there might be a very solid income (but no riches) to be had for a sage in his tower exploring the intricacies of n-planar spiral magic forms, but the REAL wealth will go to either the daring spell-slinger working with the artifact retrieval team, or the innovative apprentice that figures out that the resonance between the 7th abyss level and the third astral allows for an exponential increase of casting power without increased drain on the caster.

[marycatelli]

Yeah, but once they make the breakthroughs, it really matters whether a run-of-the-mill master needs to trade his skills or could live entirely independently