#19 - Professor: Economists argue that buying lottery

[Erik Shum]

Hi Snowy,

You (and Leela) make a good point: answer choice (E) does not establish that improving well-being can be equated to a wise use of resources.

However, when weakening the professor's argument, we do not need to go that far. As the previous posters have stated, answer choices (A) through (D) do not weaken the professor's argument. Answer choice (E), however, introduces a new variable beyond just the expected net return of lottery tickets and insurance: that losing has a greater negative impact than winning's positive impact (apologies: I am paraphrasing for simplicity). It is akin to saying the rules that apply to assessing the wisdom of spending on a windfall do not apply identically to assessing the wisdom of spending to protect against loss.

Once we establish that the impact of losing is not the same as winning (sorry, still paraphrasing), then the economists' argument that lottery tickets are unwise but insurance policies are not could be a reasonable argument. As James Finch said earlier, the analogy between lottery tickets and insurance no longer holds.

Introducing the new variable via answer choice (E) weakens the professor's argument the most as answer choices (A) through (D) do not weaken the professor's argument at all.

[ShannonOh22]

I too chose D for this question, though I was between D and E before picking the wrong one.

I read through all previous posts to get a better understanding of what I should have been looking for in order to have selected E, and the explanations are rather muddled (no fault of your own, I blame the LSAT writers. Always the LSAT writers' fault.

I got to thinking - perhaps an easier way to discount D is by pointing out that the author never actually discusses "odds of winning" at all. The professor only talks about the "average payoff for the [lottery] tickets sold," and then draws a feeble comparison to "the average amount paid out on individual insurance policies [being] lower than the average cost of a policy". E) deals with broader, more basic monetary ideas (protection against loss vs. windfall gain), which is more easily tied to the stimulus, and would therefore more directly weaken the argument...right?

Is this approach one that holds any water? Just trying to boil it down as much as possible, without involving all of the double negatives and unnecessarily confusing verbiage the LSAT writers love so much.

Please let me know if I'm way off base, and I thank you in advance!

[Jeremy Press]

Hi Shannon,

Here's the fundamental problem with answer choice D: what it states cannot impact the argument because, even if what it says is true, it's already incorporated into the author's argument. What is the "average payoff for the tickets sold in a lottery?" The average payoff is (maybe not in one single run of the lottery, but in the aggregate) simply the total amount the lottery pays in awards multiplied by the odds of winning. The average payoff is your expected benefit as an individual consumer of lottery tickets. The professor has thus already incorporated the odds of winning the lottery into the reasoning, and, even if answer choice D is true, it doesn't fundamentally change the comparison point. The average lottery payoff is still much lower than the cost of a ticket. Same for the insurance side of the equation. Whatever the odds of a settlement, they've already been incorporated into the "average amount paid out on individual insurance policies." Even if the odds of a settlement are higher than the odds of winning the lottery, the average amount paid out on a policy is still much lower than the average cost of a policy.

Does that clarify? Hopefully so!

Jeremy

[ser219]

The professor actually doesn't care about the conclusion drawn by the economist. We as the reader have zero idea what the professor thinks about lottery tickets! We don't know if he's saying it's not unwise, or that it's wise, or anything of the sort. The professor has a big problem with the reasoning that the economist used to come to the conclusion - and it stops there!

D is a pretty useless answer because the professor isn't saying that lottery tickets not an unwise purchase. D can be true all you want, and the professor might agree with D and even go so far as to say "yep that's why buying lottery tickets are a terrible, horrible idea! But, Mr. Economist, reasoning you used in support of the conclusion is so bad - just look at my analogy."

As we see here, D did nothing to the soundness of the professors argument.


Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I see a common error among LSAT enthusiasts confusing the conclusion with the reasoning to support it.[/quote]

Is this a correct way to look at this stimulus? This makes a lot of sense for me. The professor says the reasoning is faulty and does not say anything about the conclusion. Do we know that the professor is arguing that lottery tickets is not an unwise purchase? How important is this? Worried that I might be looking into this too much.

[Adam Tyson]

Interesting analysis, ser219, and you're right that we should not be focused on whether buying lottery tickets is wise or not. The goal here is to undermine the author's argument, which is based entirely on an analogy, and the way to weaken that is to show that there is some problem with the analogy such that the two things being compared are not sufficiently similar.

That's what makes D so attractive - it tells us that the lottery and insurance are not the same in some respect. The issue with D, though, is not that it focuses on the wisdom of buying lottery tickets. It's that different odds are not such a fundamental difference that it really hurts the comparison. The author is saying "the cost/benefit ratio is usually high in both cases, but insurance isn't a waste, so the lottery doesn't have to be either." Answer D doesn't do anything to differentiate the lottery from insurance in a way that says "in one case, the cost/benefit ratio is more acceptable than in the other." So what if the payoff for the lottery is much less likely - isn't the cost also much lower?

While answer D DOES give us a difference in the things being compared, it's not a particularly important difference to his point. Answer E, however, gets to a fundamental difference that makes the two things being compared very different from each other. If something happens to us, we NEED that insurance. Nobody needs to win the lottery - it's a luxury. E attacks the analogy in a way that D really doesn't. D is about how MUCH of a waste something may or may not be, while E gets to the heart of what really constitutes waste.