"If people want that I have no doubt they will make it known to their politicians, there are all kinds of internet petition platforms for things like that and they get serious consideration if they're actually of interest to a significant share of the population."

"You still have the selection effect Pelape mentioned. It would take years for enough humans to be miserable enough to make waves but a smaller-than-petition-grade number of miserable humans is still bad."

"It is not at all clear to people who've researched it at length that caste swaps would actually make people happier."

Sigh.

"I think this is a reasonable concern of yours, but I wonder if it would be more constructively discussed through normal political channels. I'm sure many humans are already considering whether they'd want to have a caste and on what terms, and it seems strange to cut them out of the loop. Wizards seem to be very unusual humans."

"I know more Muggles than most wizards. But by all means loop in some Muggle advisors to the occupation on the subject. I think your normal political channels are lopsided and not designed to represent species-level differences or look out for the long-term good of people with short-term incentives if looking out for that doesn't look like doing exactly what you would have done anyway."

"I appreciate your advice."

"No doubt."

"I think having conversations about caste and public policy and so on through normal channels would make it clearer what is a political disagreement that people can resolve through democratic means, and what is a condition of protection from wizards, and those seem like good things to separate from one another."

"I don't represent a wizarding government. The wizarding governments of the world have come to the consensus that you're just moderately more inconvenient Muggles to be largely ignored as such, although the Chinese may be inspired to do something soon about the Statute breach depending. So I'm not sure what you mean by a normal channel."

"I mean that humans in general who have political and policy concerns should raise them with their elected representatives, or put forth proposed legislation, or try to get signatories to a petition, and that if those channels are inadequate in some way then that's a problem we need to solve but those channels are the best way to set policy that will affect lots of humans."

"I do think the channels have some serious weaknesses. For one thing, most of the constituency only has a vague uneasy feeling that Amentans sure seem to care a whole lot about how many children they have in a negative direction as warning that population controls may be on the way; for another there's weighted votes such that as nearly two thirds Anitam's population we have ten percent of the vote and a substantial empathic gulf in some differences between the species that may exacerbate this weighting even more than that between Amentan castes; for another you have a lot of strings to pull and can set up incentives and inconveniences any which way you like to get results which suit you, especially because most humans aren't accustomed to working with democratic governments particularly ones that span the globe and then some."

"We can't inform the public about population controls, and I agree that makes it a case where democratic solutions aren't really feasible. But castes seem like an issue where they are - the only stakeholders are humans, there are lots of considerations that they are well-positioned to weigh and identify, there's no secret information or concerns about publicity, what's on offer is clear and straightforward."

"I disagree the only stakeholders are humans; I think many Amentans have reason to want humans to adopt castes."

"Oh?"

"There are potential competitive advantages to being able to work in multiply casted industries sequentially or simultaneously that I think may concern Amentans, particularly purples whose work might wind up as a human fallback job. Humans who have castes are more legible to your people and convenient to your system regardless of whether it's good for humans. If you limit how many humans can be blue to a few tokens, like you did last time people were allowed to choose castes for themselves, and humans flow into castes that don't own land, then you have a lot of ammunition in any future arguments about land ownership. Also, because people don't know about population controls they can't factor in disparate credit prices while making decisions."

"Even if it's necessary to impose controls on humans, human credit auctions would be separate because your fertile window is shorter. Not having a caste is a competitive disadvantage, no one will envy humans that. Are you expecting disputes over land ownership?"

"My understanding is that currently various blues claim most of the land on the planet, even if they are graciously not yet charging rent on the occupants today."

"They're not allowed to charge rent on humans yet, humans don't have the level of mobility and access to legal recourse under which that'd be appropriate."

"And I think eventually some humans may wish to object that it was stolen."

"The slaveowners have already raised that objection, actually."

"The comparison is inappropriate."

"Oh?"

"Slaves are people who now own themselves. Land is inanimate and now belongs to blues."

"In both cases someone had an illegitimate claim which is no longer being enforced for them."