Q25 - Editorial: Any democratic society is endangered

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Strengthen

Stimulus Breakdown:
Conclusion: Democratic societies should adopt policies that ensure constant economic expansion.
Evidence: Economic expansion gives people more opportunities to improve their economic standing. Without those opportunities / that mobility, democratic societies end up with huge income inequality, which strengthens divisive politics and undermines good governance.

Answer Anticipation:
We could think of this as a Problem / Solution type argument. The Problem is that we need people to have upward mobility, or else we get class warfare, vicious politics, and bad governance. The author's Solution is "constant growth". We could ask ourselves
1. Are there downsides to economic growth that would more than offset the advantages?
2. Are there any options besides "constant growth" if we want to achieve good upward mobility?

A correct answer should tell us more good stuff about constant expansion, or rule out possible downsides or alternative solutions to our upward mobility problem.

Correct Answer:
C

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Maybe. We know that class divisions strengthen divisive political factions (discord within a society). This answer adds that discord leads to more class divisions. So this sounds like a pretty nasty negative feedback loop we need to thwart with constant expansion. But since the answer doesn't directly deal with economic expansion, it seems a little suspect. This answer underscores the problem we want to prevent from occurring, but it does nothing to support the solution that the author recommends.

(B) So weak it's not really even worth thinking about: "sometimes".

(C) YES, this seems pretty good. A possible objection to "constant expansion" could be, "What if more of the gains from an expanding economy go to the rich than to the poor? That would INCREASE class divisions, leading to worse governance." This rules out that objection by saying, "Don't worry .. when we expand and people get more opportunities to improve, more of the improvement goes to poor people than to richer people."

(D) Learning a necessary condition to economic expansion doesn't shed much light on whether we should adopt policies that guarantee it. If anything, telling me that economic expansion requires something difficult would WEAKEN this author's suggestion. It makes it sound very difficult to maintain the significant investment from rich people that is necessary for constant expansion.

(E) This is super weak: "X can be an obstacle". Also, if we already have divisive political factions (we don't know), this answer seems to suggest that we have an OBSTACLE to following the author's advice. So it feels more like Weaken than Strengthen.

Takeaway/Pattern: Since the evidence identified "income inequality" as a causal difference maker when it came to achieving vs. undermining good governance, the correct answer makes us feel better about constant economic expansion being a force that would shrink inequality, rather than expand it. There's an inherent ambiguity in saying "expansion gives people more opportunities to improve economic standing" -- we want to interpret that as referring to the lower classes, but that sentence itself is compatible with the idea that expansion gives rich people more opportunities to get even richer. The correct answer rules out that objection.

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