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bramflakes comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The mutual benefits of trade are non-obvious to humans, and many cultures have seen merchants as low-status because of a naive notion that they don't contribute anything.
In most societies, there was no remotely adequate solution to the problems of tracking reputations and punishing violations of trust for merchants who operated outside the narrow circle of their own communities. So merchants were largely viewed as scammers because they mostly were; nothing naive about it.
Second thought: of course dishonest merchants exist, but it's also true that merchants upset static status arrangements like controlling land being the only important thing.
Evidence that merchants were mostly scammers?
I would think that most merchants were working territories and dealing with the same people repeatedly, but I'm guessing, too.
I don't think this is historically true. Humans actively traded since paleolithic times (there are archeological finds like amber far away inland or stone tools made out of stone that does not occur anywhere locally).
Merchants were typically seen as of lower status than the nobles and the military (for rather obvious reasons), but of higher status than craftsmen and peasants.
I don’t think that was intrinsic to being a merchant, just a consequence of (some of them) being richer.
I think even simpler than this is the fact that the wizards don't have anything of worth to trade to the Muggles, since non-magical people have a hard time even seeing magical artifacts, much less using them.
Muggles have plenty of things that would be useful to Wizards, but the reverse isn't true.
Wizards have plenty to trade to Muggles - by providing services, not products.
Great list. Upvoted.
I think that actually failed ...
Well, it's not clear why it failed exactly. It might have been because it never existed before, but it seems more likely to me that it was because Harry didn't know what it was exactly. He didn't try to transmute "this molecular structure I have in my mind", he tried to transmute "a substance I know nothing about except that it cures Alzheimer's". That was probably not specific enough for the spell. (Otherwise, why not transmute a black-box device with a big red "kill Voldemort where-ever he is" button, or a mysterious "bring a dead body back to life" device?)
In any case there are things who physical properties we know, and which exist or have existed, but would be very valuable to create in laboratories. Like creating a string of DNA to order, which can then replicate itself into ordinary non-transmuted matter - very valuable in 1993!
Yeah, Harry discovered that you can't transmute something that hasn't already been created through more conventional means.
Nothing of worth? The canon explanation for the Wizarding world's masquerade, from just a few chapters into the series, is that wizards would be in such demand by muggles that it would be too irritating and waste too much time.
Magical goods maybe, magical services certainly not. There are many things that magic could do to add value to non-magical objects, which then do not require any further magic to sustain (see Harry and Hermione's discussion about helping to manufacture nanotechnology and/or Alzheimer's cures).
That's true. Everyone's talking so much about stealing gold and magical artifacts that I didn't think of magical services.