#11 - Household indebtedness, which some theorists regard as

[Adam Tyson]

Good question, gen! The standard for a weaken question is substantially lower than where you have set it in this analysis, because we don't actually have to prove anything. Instead, for a weaken question we only need to introduce some doubt about the validity of the conclusion. Just a little doubt will do!

In this case, the author is arguing that household debt cannot have been the cause of the recent recession, because low income households could not have gotten into enough debt to have mattered. He thinks that only the very affluent had debt, and since they had assets that debt wouldn't have caused them to reduce spending.

Now all we have to do it suggest that maybe, just maybe, household debt COULD have caused a reduction in spending that led to the recession. Answer A supplies that by telling us that there is a third group involved, not mentioned by the author, which is the group of middle-income people. Maybe they had enough debt to make the difference? That's not a third cause, gen - it's still the "household debt" cause, the one the author claimed did not cause the recession! That's exactly what we wanted to see!

[mrcheese]

I was going to say, I picked D. I see the false dilemma that is present in the stimulus and being more familiar with possible flaws in the stimuli would have led to the correct answer (for me anyway).

D says: "DURING a recession the affluent usually borrow money..."

If they are borrowing money during the recession it would have no impact on what the cause of the recession was.

That is the way I see it. D becomes the type of answer choice where you just have to read it more closely...

[Claire Horan]

Hi Mr. Cheese,

This is a good statement of why answer choice D doesn't weaken, and is in fact irrelevant, to the argument:

If they are borrowing money during the recession it would have no impact on what the cause of the recession was.

Good job with your analysis!

[ashpine17]

Honestly, I was confused even before hitting the answer choices. How exactly does household indebtedness, which I assume is referring to the amount of debt or money each household owes, contributes to a recession? Is it the decrease in spending that households undergo in order to pay off said debt that is causing the recession? And for this question, why is it okay to bring in the middle class when they were previously unmentioned in the stimulus?

[ashpine17]

And the author tries to counter the claim the theorists make in the stimulus by stating that the lower-income households were the ones who didn't have the debt because people without assets couldn't get loans. But why couldn't household debt still be the cause if the wealthy were the ones in debt? Is the author assuming the wealthy would have been able to pay off the debt without decreasing spending? Or am I looking too much into this?

[Adam Tyson]

I think you may be too focused on the details here, ashpine17, and trying to make sense of this argument in the real world, like it's a question about economics. We don't need to do that on the LSAT! We just need to focus on the argument's structure and find the flaw in that structure.

This argument does make real world sense, and the author explains it (and I think you got it based on your first post). Rich people can still buy stuff even if they have debt, so their debt couldn't have caused the recession. Poor people don't have debts. Thus, the author says, household debt couldn't have caused the recession.

This argument presents something like a false dilemma, or a failure to consider additional options. What if there is a third group, neither very affluent nor very low income, some middle-income group that had enough debt that they would reduce spending enough to cause a recession? If that's so, then perhaps it was their household debt that was the cause?

Stripping away the details, the author is arguing that a group at one end of a spectrum couldn't be the cause, and the group at the other end couldn't be the cause, so therefore nothing on that spectrum could be the cause. To weaken that we want to point out that there may be something in the middle of the spectrum that could be the cause. That's what answer A does, making it our winner.

Don't get too caught up in the details! Just find that underlying structure.

[ikim10]

Hello. I managed to narrow down the answer choices to my 2 contenders (A) and (C). I ended up choosing (C) over (A) for 2 main reasons:

1) (A) mentioned middle-income households, which was not mentioned in the stimulus. Even though on Weaken questions new information can be brought in, because the stimulus mentioned how household indebtedness could be the cause if lower-income household decreased spending, I thought the actions of middle-income households was irrelevant.

2) Even though (C) qualified the decrease in spending by lower-income household by "somewhat," I thought it was stronger than (A) because it specifically mentioned one of the causes in the stimulus that could cause household debt to be the cause of the recession.

I diagrammed the relationships below like this:

lower-income households own most debt
and household debt causes recession
affluent households own assets


lower-income households decrease spending
and household debt causes recession
affluent households fail to increase spending




The author argues that one of the causes is not true:

lower-income households do NOT own most debt
and       household debt does NOT cause recession
affluent households own most debts and assets

I thought (C) showed that lower-income household did decrease spending (somewhat), implying that they owned some of the debt, thereby fulfilling the causal relationship posed by the author and weakening it.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

The fact that they didn't address middle-income households is the exact reason that it weakens the argument here, ikim! The author of the stimulus is creating a false dichotomy, making it look like the only households that matter are those at the extreme ends. But there are so many others in the country, and answer choice (A) exploits that fact. If middle-income households are decreasing spending, it doesn't matter if low-income households are overwhelmed by debt or not. We have the necessary decrease in spending that "some people" think causes recessions. The author is saying household debt does not cause recessions. Answer choice (A) weakens that by showing that we don't have the cause, but we still have the effect of a recession. Another way to think about it is this---the author is arguing against the idea that household indebtedness causes recessions. Answer choice (A) strengthens the idea the author doesn't like by showing household indebtedness (the cause) occurring before the recession (the effect). So even though middle-income households were not a part of the stimulus, they are a part of the overall economy and were not outside of the scope of what we can use in an answer choice.

Answer choice (C) is not something that weakens the argument. Somewhat decreasing spending doesn't tell us about the indebtedness of those households, nor does it indicate that the households held "most" of the debt as in the stimulus. We don't know if the low-income households are decreasing spending due to debt, or due to some other reason. It's missing a key part of the causal chain proposed by the author.

Hope that helps!