Question 2
toothless123
I had a doubt in Option A of Q2(price and wage policy). Option A talks about countries that repeatedly use price and wage controls, whereas author's conclusion doesn't clearly mention about repeated use of price wage controls. Can this be inferred from the passage or is it safe to assume that such policies will be applied repeatedly and not just once during a high inflation economic cycle?
Even though, I understand that this option is best out of all the options, my thought process regarding Option A is that maybe applying the policy repeatedly causes long term damage but we don't know the effect of applying it non-repeatedly (maybe applying this policy after a long time period once/ twice may not result in as much harm). And if author's conclusion doesn't mention the frequency then Option A may not actually support the conclusion.
The right answer to this question should "most strengthen the author's conclusion about the use of wage and price controls." More specifically, it should strengthen the idea that wage and price controls ultimately "do damage to the economy’s prospects for long-term growth."
Notice that we aren't looking for something that
conclusively proves the author's argument to be correct. Instead, we're looking for the answer choice that "
most strengthens" it.
Let's consider (A) again:
Quote:
(A) Countries that repeatedly use wage and price controls tend to have lower long-term economic growth rates than do other countries.
This fact suggests that wage and price controls do in fact damage long-term growth. For that reason, (A) is correct.
Of course, it doesn't
conclusively prove that wage and price controls damage long-term growth. Maybe other factors, aside from wage and price controls, are actually causing the damage in these countries? In other words, maybe what we're seeing is not a causal effect, but merely a correlation of wage and price controls with lower growth?
So (A) isn't airtight evidence that the author's argument is 100% correct. Nonetheless, it
strengthens the conclusion better than any other answer choice.
As you point out, the author doesn't specify the number of times wage and price controls need to be implemented, or how extensively they need to be applied, to slow economic growth. And since the author doesn't give us specifics here, it probably won't help to fill in the gaps ourselves. In fact, doing so runs the risk of distorting the author's position. For instance, we wouldn't want to change the author's argument to "one application of wage and price controls is always sufficient to damage long-term economic growth." That would certainly distort the author's point of view, and throw off our analysis.
Instead, let's stick with author's general point that wage and price controls ultimately "do damage to the economy's prospects for long-term growth." Keeping the author's exact argument in mind, we can conclude that (A), while not conclusive proof, is the best answer of the five we're given.
I hope that helps!