December 2004 LSAT Section 5 Question 18

Decentralization enables divisions of a large institution to function autonomously. This always permits more realisti...

McCannon on May 26, 2020

Why Choice B is incorrect

I read answer B as being the negation of a decentralized institution, therefore we know that innovation is not encouraged. Can you help me through why this line of thought is wrong

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shunhe on May 27, 2020

Hi @McCannon,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at what the stimulus is telling us. We’re told that decentralization lets different parts of a large institution function by themselves, which always (an important word!) permits more realistic planning and strongly encourages innovation. It also lets the central administration focus on institution-wide issues without being overwhelmed by the details of daily operations.

OK, so now we’re asked for an answer choice that the statements most strongly support. Let’s take a look at (B), which tells us that innovation is not always encouraged in large centralized institutions. But this is basically a mistaken negation. We know that decentralization encourages innovation, but we can’t conclude anything about centralized institutions based on what we know about decentralized institutions. It could definitely be the case that large centralized institutions encourage innovation, and decentralized institutions just encourage it more. In other words

decentralized —> encourage innovation

does not allow us to conclude

~decentralized —> ~encourage innovation

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.