QUESTION TEXT: Candidate: The government spends $500 million more…
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Parallel Reasoning
CONCLUSION: We could save lives by shifting highway safety money to smoking prevention.
REASONING: More people die from smoking, but the government spends more money on highway safety.
ANALYSIS: This is a dumb argument. Maybe fewer people die from highway accidents because the government spends more money on highway safety.
Also, we have no idea whether anti-smoking programs work. Maybe spending more money on them would be a waste.
There are a two things to notice:
- The smaller problem gets more resources.
- We know how many resources each problem gets.
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- In the stimulus, more money was being spent on the smaller problem. Here, more money is being spend on the bigger problem.
- CORRECT. Maybe the musician is already so good at saxophone practice that more practice wouldn’t help. We need actual evidence that switching priorities would bring a benefit.
- This is a good argument. MPG are better on highways, so we’d save money if people drove the same distance on highways rather than residential streets.
- Similar to A. The biggest problem (backstroke) gets the most practice. In the stimulus, the biggest problem (smoking) got the least money.
- This isn’t a great argument. It’s hard to say whether banks would be better off with many loans at a low rate or a few loans at a higher rate. But we don’t know which type of loans currently gets the most resources from the bank, so this isn’t like the stimulus.
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