The complaint about the epilogue mirrors one of Orwell's complaints about Dickens's happy endings:

"This is the type of the Victorian happy ending — a vision of a huge, loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters. What is striking about it is the utterly soft, sheltered, effortless life that it implies. It is not even a violent idleness, like Squire Western's."

To Dickens, and apparently to JKR, the object of going through all these vicisitudes is precisely so that you can arrive at safe, sheltered domesticity. Adventure and challenge are not to be sought out -- they are an infliction to be overcome so that your children will never have to face them. The generation of parents who lived through the Depression and World War II felt the same way. We can console ourselves that the next generation of wizard kids will react ungratefully against their parents as the Boomers did. Now there's a sequel -- the wizard equivalent of the 1960s.

Orwell also pointed out that Dickens had no idea how things worked economically, and that the reader had no sense how his better off characters made their livings. JKR's invented world likewise doesn't include an economy. Except for teachers, bureaucrats, journalists, shopkeepers, servants and the driver of the Knight Bus, we have no idea of the characters' livelihoods. Where does the Malfoys' money come from? How do Hermione's parents raise the wizard currency to pay her tuition? Is the Ministry of Magic supported by taxes? Why are there richer or poorer wizard families, and why, indeed, does the magical world need money at all? Is there a sub-wizard human population to manufacture cauldrons and grow food for the wizard world?

JKR's primary audience of children don't, for the most part, ask questions like that about their own world. Food is what's in the supermarket, and work is the incomprehensible things adults do out of sight all day. It isn't exactly fair for adult critics to complain that she hasn't answered such questions, but it is a sign of the completeness of her fictional world that we ask them

The Orwellian insight is much appreciated. I think we can see glimmers of the revolution in little Albus Severus' tantrums in the Epilogue train station. In regards to money and finances, though, I don't think the omission of the origins of class stratification in the Wizarding world is a lack of "completeness" on Rowling's part. The Wizarding world is meant to be entirely parallel to the Muggle one, from the existence of government Ministries to the historical favoring of aristocratic families over commoners. Titled Muggles have always appeared to "do" nothing (unless drinking, gambling, frequenting debutante balls, and ocasionally making the rounds of one's grounds/tenants can be considered "doing work"). The Malfoys, like their ducal Muggle counterparts, likely have an army of estate managers and clerks and rent collectors overseeing their properties and finances.

Can't speak to what Lily's job was, but Rowling gives us hints that James was of an, if not aristocratic, than certainly a venerable old Wizarding family with a comfortable existence; note how in Snape's last memories, young James on the Hogwarts Express gives off vibes of having been well-cared for, "even adored."

Fair point about the Muggle parallel, but in our world (or more accurately in the 18th-19th century English literary version of it), we know that people with what the English called "private means" lived on rent from family landholdings or on the income from government bonds or investments. Readers of Austen, Dickens or Trollope knew how such things worked and took them for granted as background information.

JKR doesn't really show us what the Wizard world equivalents are; nor, except for the teachers and civil servants, do we have any sense of the workaday world for people without private means.

I believe Hermione's parents were dentists (hence them being upset at the magical intervention that made her front teeth smaller after they were magically enlarged) I'm sure they just exchanged some currency.

I've always been particularly perplexed by the workings of the Ministry of Magic, which seems to be a public-private partnership beyond the dreams of most Muggle politicos. The place simultaneously regulates, sets policy, and organises sporting events - what's not to like? Is it just a function of the relative numerical insignificance of the magical population, that a centralised authority is more efficient?

In a similar vein, I've also always been curious as to where the Minister for Magic gets his authority. Dumbledore is apparently "offered" the job several times, but refuses, and in the last two books M4Ms are replaced with depressing frequency. Is the Minister a civil servant, or a politician? Is tthere some sort of committee that decides all this? Voting from home by owl? I wonder....because Rowling's magical world doesn't seem terribly concerned with democracy as a first princple. House Elves are slaves, Centaurs are shoved onto reserves, and a magic hat determines whether you're stuck with the cool kids or with the slimeballs for seven years of school.

Is there coherence in all this social criticisn/theory? Or are we asking too much? Think about the land of Narnia - how on earth did THAT economy work?

Well, we don't ask that about Narnia because Narnia is a fully separate world run on mythological-heroic principles. JKR's world supposedly exists alongside us, just out of sight of us muggles. (In a way, it is every square's paranoid fantasy of the hip world barely glimpsed in the corner of the eye). As the MM's dealings with the Prime Minister illustrate, it interconnects with ours.

While its political structure is unclear, the social structure of wizard world bears a pretty strong resemblence to the 18th-19th century England of literary memory. In such a society, politics is conducted among a pretty small group of the right people, who may disagree with one another but who all know one another -- indeed, who all went to school together. Whatever the formal structure, some sort of Old Boy and Girl network probably decides who will be MM or Head of Hogwarts.

That raises the larger question of how those muggles in the know, whether the PM, the Dursleys or the Drs. Granger, are induced or compelled not to tell other muggles about it. (For that matter, how were the Grangers persuaded to send their clever young daughter to Hogwarts?) Even a mugglephile like Mr. Weasley would consider concealment essential -- after all, muggles have a long history of burning real or imagined practitioners of the magical arts at the stake out of fear, envy, and superstition.

All wizards feel superior to muggles, who are both ignorant and incapable of magic. Voldemort and his followers are tired of hiding from their inferiors and believe that open domination is both possible and justified. If they got rid of the hereditary principle and accepted magical talent wherever it manifested itself, rule by a wizard meritocracy might be a pretty attractive program.