Logical Reasoning

PT13 · S4 · Q10 At the beginning of each month

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At the beginning of each month, companies report to the federal government their net loss or gain in jobs over the past month.

Given that ...

Companies accurately reported their net loss/gain in jobs over the past month, and the government correctly tallied them up.

How can it be that ...

The number of jobs lost was significantly underestimated in the recent recession?

Evaluate

If all the data coming in is accurate, and all the compilation of that data is done correctly, then how could we have flawed data?

Goal

If none of the info coming in is flawed, and nothing we're doing with that info is flawed, then it seems like the only way for our final tally to be off would be if we're missing data.

Let's look for an answer that suggests we're missing some of the data we need. We know that companies are accurately reporting their gain/loss of jobs, but there must be some part of the story we're missing.

10.

Which one of the following, if true, contributes most to a resolution of the apparent discrepancy described?

  1. More jobs are lost in

    Irrelevant Comparison

    This is a pretty common sense comparison between bad economic times and good economic times, but it doesn't provide us any story for why our data on the bad times was off.

    4% picked this

  2. The expenses of collecting and

    Cheats Paradox / Thin Ice

    In order for us to use this idea to explain our flawed data, it seems like we'd be telling a story like, "Now that it's more expensive to collect and report employment data, we're doing it wrong." But we know from the background facts that all data from companies was accurate and was compiled accurately, so we can't say that cost-cutting made any of that data bad. We might try to stretch this answer to mean that, "because of cost-cutting, we don't get all the info we need -- thus there is missing info!" That's going a little too far on Thin Ice; this answer doesn't clearly suggest that we have any missing info.

    1% picked this

  3. More people who lose their

    Irrelevant Comparison

    It doesn't really matter to us what the jobless do next, whether they seek out another job or start their own business or decide to live on their fishing boat at sea. If they start their own business, then presumably they are a company and so they would be part of the "accurate reporting by companies". This doesn't give us any storyline for missing / flawed data.

    13% picked this

  4. Correct

    In the recent recession a

    Why this is right

    This sneakily points toward the missing info. Companies that survived the recession would dutifully / accurately report their jobs gains and losses to the government (probably mostly losses). But companies that went under during the recession would mean a bunch of lost jobs (everyone who worked for those companies) but also mean that there's no HR employee left over to submit to the government the job loss numbers. They abruptly ceased all operations. If your business goes under on July 10th, and abruptly ceases all operations, then all the jobs at that company are lost, but come August 1st when it's time to fill out the jobs report, there's no one at the company to tell the government about what happened, about the jobs that were lost. So the government would be undercounting how many jobs were lost in July, because it never again hears from the companies that just suddenly imploded once we reach August.

    Skill tested: Paradox · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    78% picked this

  5. The recent recession contributed to

    Irrelevant Comparison

    There's no common sense leap we can make from "there are more service jobs than manufacturing jobs" to some story about erroneous or incomplete jobs reporting. After all, we were told there was accurate reporting by companies, which would include both service-based and manufacturing-based companies.

    4% picked this

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