QUESTION TEXT: Politicians often advocate increased overall economic …
QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Reasoning
CONCLUSION: Increasing overall economic productivity may benefit businesses but hurt workers.
REASONING: If you increase economic productivity in a single company, that company may lay off workers as it gets more efficient. This helps profits.
ANALYSIS: This argument makes a part to whole flaw: it uses evidence from a single company to make a conclusion about the economy as a whole. The problem is that even if a single company lays off workers, another company may grow and hire them. Individual companies have gotten more productive for decades, but the unemployment rate hasn’t risen.
There’s a word for this in economics: it’s referred to as the “lump of labor fallacy”, the idea that there is only so much work to be done in the world, and we shouldn’t get more efficient or people will become unemployed. So far, this has never happened.
“Productivity” refers to how many people it takes to get work done. For example, in the past, to get an explanation for a question like this, you would have had to hire a tutor. This was expensive, and there were many LSAT tutors all across North America. Then, sites like this that provide free explanations meant that a single person can help thousands of students. There was an increase in productivity in the LSAT industry, and many LSAT tutors went out of business.
Did they become unemployed? Was this bad for the economy? Should we shut my website down to boost the LSAT tutor industry? No, no and no. The LSAT tutors simply found other work. Most of them went on to become lawyers, or teachers, or whatnot.
The author forgets that people laid off from one role can do another role. There are some cases where this is very hard on an individual, but in other cases, the labor freed up from one company can now be used by another company which grows large. If productivity had never changed, we’d all still be farmers, and we wouldn’t be able to produce most of the things we do as a society.
___________
- The author actually didn’t say that we should avoid productivity increases. Their main claim was that there are drawbacks, yet politicians ignore drawbacks.
Example of this answer: “And so, we should destroy technology and slow technical progress in order to hold back productivity and boost employment.” - CORRECT. This could have been said more directly, but it’s the right answer. See my economic explanation in the analysis section, but briefly: if a single business becomes more productive, they may shed workers. But that doesn’t mean an economy will cut jobs if it becomes more productive. Usually, new companies will form and hire the other workers. Reality bears this out: the US unemployment rate has not risen, despite decades of productivity improvements.
- I wouldn’t say the author did this. They only said politicians “often” want to boost productivity. They are clearly not talking about politicians in general.
Example of flaw: I interviewed two congresspeople who weren’t concerned about productivity’s effects on unemployment. So every politician in the whole world shares this flaw. - ….The author didn’t say this! They said that productivity increases are not always more important than worker employment. Further, the author said productivity increases do benefit business owners, but not workers.
You may have picked this thinking it was referring to politicians, who push productivity without thinking about workers. But we’re supposed to find the author’s flaw, not the politicians’ flaw. - You have to interpret LSAT answers literally. Think about what this answer would entail. If you try to address all possible drawbacks and benefits of something….you’d need a 400 page report. Life is complex, and “all” is a big, big word when interpreted literally. You’d need to consider profits, the environment, effects on sleep, changes to local traffic planning, effects on family structure, spinoff sales of shoes to local merchants, etc. etc.
Rest assured that in real life, no sane person ever tries to address all potential benefits and drawbacks of an action. There certainly isn’t space to do so in an LSAT question!
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