Akela wrote:
One of the claims of laissez-faire economics is that increasing the minimum wage reduces the total number of minimumwage jobs available. In a recent study, however, it was found that after an increase in the minimum wage, fast-food restaurants kept on roughly the same number of minimum-wage employees as before the increase. Therefore, laissez-faire economics is not entirely accurate.
The essayist’s argument depends on assuming which one of the following?
(A) If laissez-faire economics makes an incorrect prediction about the minimum wage, then all the doctrines of laissez-faire economics are inaccurate.
(B) Minimum-wage job availability at fast-food restaurants included in the study was representative of minimum-wage job availability in general.
(C) No study has ever found that a business has decreased the number of its minimum-wage employees after an increase in the minimum wage.
(D) The fast-food restaurants included in the study did not increase the average wage paid to employees.
(E) The national unemployment rate did not increase following the increase in the minimum wage.
Source: LSAT
Dear
Akela,
I'm happy to respond.
The LSAT Logical Reasoning questions are very similar to the GMAT Critical Reasoning questions, but the former are typically a notch or two harder (because it's VERY important for lawyers to understand arguments!) It's true that the LSAT LR provides excellent practice for building the kinds of analytical skills you need in GMAT CR, but not every LSAT LR argument has the feel of a GMAT CR argument. This one doesn't quite have the feel of a GMAT CR argument, but it's still a solid LSAT question.
We are looking for an assumption, so we can use, among other things, the
Negation Test.
(A) If laissez-faire economics makes an incorrect prediction about the minimum wage, then all the doctrines of laissez-faire economics are inaccurate.Way too extreme! One wrong prediction and we chuck the entire academic discipline in the garbage? An absurd overgeneralization. This is incorrect.
(B) Minimum-wage job availability at fast-food restaurants included in the study was representative of minimum-wage job availability in general.Ah ha! This sound reasonable. If the fast-food restaurants included were not representative of the general economy, we wouldn't be able to draw a general conclusion from them. This is a promising choice.
(C) No study has ever found that a business has decreased the number of its minimum-wage employees after an increase in the minimum wage."
No study ever"? Again, way too extreme. This is incorrect.
(D) The fast-food restaurants included in the study did not increase the average wage paid to employees.Interesting. Let's take this as is. If the wage for the minimum-wage jobs went up, then the only way the average would stay the same is if other jobs, say middle managers, had their wages decrease. The conclusion of the argument is only about minimum wage jobs, so this piece of information brings in the effect on higher wage jobs, which is strictly irrelevant to the argument. This is incorrect.
(E) The national unemployment rate did not increase following the increase in the minimum wage.The national unemployment rate depends on a thousand different factors. What happens with minimum-wage jobs in a single study is almost entirely irrelevant to large-scale shifts in the overall economy. Anything that happened or didn't happen in this study would be simply a rounding error in the movements of the larger economy. This is out-of-scope and incorrect.
The only possible answer is
(B), the OA.
Does all this make sense?
Mike

You mentioned that this question doesn't have the feel of a GMAT CR argument. Is it because it tests the principle behind the argument?