Q16 - Tenants who do not have to pay their own

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Weaken

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: If more landlords install INDIVIDUAL electricity meters, energy will be conserved.
Evidence: With COLLECTIVE electricity meters, tenants have no financial incentive to conserve electricity.

Answer Anticipation:
LSAT has many times tested the gap between "someone having an INCENTIVE to do a certain thing" and "someone actually doing that thing". Or in this case, "they DON'T have a FINANCIAL INCENTIVE" to conserve energy, so we assume "they don't conserve energy". It's possible that we do something even though we lack incentive for doing it. It's even more likely that we do some things not for FINANCIAL incentive but for some other incentive (moral? environmental? love of efficiency?)

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) If anything, this feels like it strengthens. If tenants pay extra rent, they might be more inclined to use electricity (in order "to get their money's worth")

(B) This doesn't seem to apply to our tenants, because they presumably know that they don't pay an electricity bill.

(C) Yes, although I'm surprised this is the correct answer. This weakens if we think that "switching to having tenants pay their own bills wouldn't save energy … even though the tenants would conserve energy more, we'd miss out on having those energy efficient appliances". The problem is that we're adding a lot assumptions to make that story work. First of all, it's unlikely that if a landlord switched to an individual billing system that he would then choose to yank out the energy efficient appliances. Secondly, it's likely that if a tenant had to pay for her own electricity that she would ALSO want to have energy efficient appliances.

Ultimately, though, this is the correct answer. It is strongly worded, "they have a strong incentive", and so it raises the doubt about whether we'd miss out on the energy savings of efficient appliances if landlords were planning to make their tenants pay individual energy bills. Because of the phrasing "the appliances they provide for their tenants", I think we're not allowed to think that tenants would pick energy efficient appliances of their own accord, or that tenants would remove the low-efficiency appliances provided and replace them with more efficient ones.

(D) This argument isn't about whether a change is practical or feasible. It's just about predicting the outcome of a hypothetical world.

(E) Too weak. This gets at the assumption the author makes that "if they don't have a FINANCIAL incentive to conserve energy, then they won't be conserving energy." But since it's only "some", it could be as little as one person, and so it doesn't have much punching power.

Takeaway/Pattern: Often "some" and "many" are too weak to be involved in the correct answer. But, if no other answers weaken, then something that weakens a little is still the answer that "most weakens".

In this case, (C) weakened enough to outshine the weak-sauce power of (E). I'm surprised by this question and would have gotten it wrong. (E) is so clearly going against an assumption the author is making that you would think it would be the right answer.

(C) is appealing to LSAT's broader habit of testing how a plan might backfire.
PLAN: make tenants pay their own bill. GOAL: use less energy.
BACKFIRE: tenants might try harder to conserve energy, but they will be doing so with less energy efficient appliances.


#officialexplanation

[NoahS986]

So, just to clarify, would the rationale for the correct answer essentially be that (along with all the assumptions you list) "since energy efficient appliances are (likely) used en masse by tenants who don't pay electricity individually, then it is less likely that energy will be conserved as a result of the meter installation"?

[syp]

Hi,

I still don't understand why C is right. I have read your explanation several times. I understand the assumption is since the tenants don't have an incentive to conserve energy, they don't conserve it.

Is it correct to say that C weakens because it provides the possibility that energy wouldn't be conserved since the tenants are already using energy efficient appliances? I did not fully understand your explanation for C and want to clarify my understanding of this question. Thank you in advance!

[ohthatpatrick]

Sorry my explanation was muddled in part because of my chagrin at the correct answer.

The conclusion is
"if tenants start paying their own bills, we'll conserve energy"

so the anti-conclusion (opposing counsel's position) is
"if tenants start paying their own bills, we WON'T necessarily conserve energy"

(C) helps us argue the counterposition by saying,
"Switching to a tenant-pays system isn't going to help us conserve energy. In the landlord-pays system, the landlord has a huge financial motivation to install energy conserving appliances. If we switch to a tenant-pays system, then the landlord will just install cheaper, energy-wasting appliances."

The idea with (C) is that even though the tenants might be more frugal with their use of energy, they'll be using much less efficient appliances, so there won't be a net savings of energy.

We are assuming that once landlords' financial incentive to install energy efficient appliances goes away, they will no longer install energy efficient appliances.

And if they install energy-wasting appliances instead, then even if tenants start acting more as energy conservationists, we might still end up with a net loss of energy.

[ChrisB741]

I'm not sure that i agree with Patrick on this explanation. (Although this is the first time I've ever disagreed with Patrick), i think that C can be the correct answer choice without the "needed" assumptions that follow the above explanation.

C is simply pointing out that the appliances are already energy efficient, and that having the tenants pay for their own electricity is not going to change much. I think that the assumption here is that maybe they can't save more than they already are.

[LolaC289]

I would like to address (A) a little bit further! Because at first I was tempted by it.

(A) seems to be saying that even if those tenants do not need to pay their own electricity bills, they will have to pay in the form of rent if they use too much. So, even before the proposed change, those tenants already have the motive to conserve energy themselves. Thus, this change doesn't seem that necessary.

However, we can't tell this from (A). It doesn't say if the extra rent to pay is proportional to amount of the electricity tenants use.

Additionally, even if (A) says tenants who use more electricity DO need to pay more (in rent), it actually doesn't hurt the argument.

Because the conclusion is that a proposed change will bring about certain benefit. Trying to establishing WITHOUT the proposed change, those benefits still happen does nothing to weaken it. We are trying to weaken X->Y. No X still Y does not weaken it.

However, (C) does this by introducing the REMOVAL a previous POSITIVE FACTOR, and that's the contribution of landlords. It brings in the doubt of whether the benefit this change brings will outweigh this reduction.

(Also, it also have the problem of negating the premise? Since the premise clearly says in the first sentence that those tenants DO NOT have a financial incentive to conserve).

Help this helps!

[JinZ551]

I wrongly picked B for this one. I eliminated C because I thought having strong incentives to do sth does not mean they actually do install efficient appliances. And even if the electric utility is billed to the tenants, they can also keep installing efficient appliances right? Why is it not compatible for landlords to install efficient appliances while billing utility to their tenants?

Though I chose B but now I can see how it is a weak answer choice here, though for a reason different from Patrick's. Initialtives having been IMPLEMENTED, but we dont know how effective they are at persuading people to conserve?

[HadisA912]

Hi,

(A) implies that after installing the electricity meters, all that happens is that the tenants pay LESS rent to the landlords, to be precise, the old rent minus to electricity bill, and then, take that saved amount to pay at the end of every month for what the meter says. But what the meter says will most likely be what they would've paid in addition to the landlord

(C) Why would a landlord have an incentive to invest in elec. saving devices? Apparently in this scenario, the tenant pays a fixed amount to the landlord, and can abuse energy, because he knows it is unlimited. So switching now, tenants can't keep abusing like that without having to pay more. This is the strongest out of all choices