[Thaumatology] Magic as Perks

[KarlKost]

That depends, those perks are natural inborn talents, or can they be learned?

Irl we had universities being built in Medieval Europe, mostly to study theology at the beggining.

Nowadays, modern societies put a lot of effort to educate a few citizens into engineering skills, sciences and humanities, because of the return that this kind of investments generate.

Even dystopian and highly dysfunctional dictatorships like North Korea or Iran have engineers.

This kind of "low magic" would greatly change society - but not all at once, instead in incremental stages. First by slightly increasing overall productivity.

Second, people with such vital magical capacities would gain special social status. It would become harder to "put the peasants in their place" if those peasants can make the wheat grow 3x times fastes, or if those peasants are responsible to make the best swords in the feud.

This would quickly induce a meritocratic system of the mages, a "magetocracy".

And, if those capabilities can be learned, societies would begin to stockpile their resources in order to fund the education of mages.

Nobles irl began to have those problems with the ascension of the burgeouise, and those only had money, not magic powers.

In time, the wizards' Ivory Towers could begin to totally dominate socities, with all the resources spent on sustaining a meritocratic elite while the masses are left to fight for scraps