Advertisement: Each of the Economic Merit Prize winners from the past 25 years is covered by the Acme retirement pla...

Shula on October 23, 2023

Please explain why D is correct. Meanwhile, is C wrong b/c it says "experts"?

Emil-Kunkin on October 26, 2023

The argument proceeds by showing that since winners of an economics prize all use the same retirement plan, that plan is a good one. There are several ways we could attack this. First, economists are not necessarily personal financial advisors, and may not actually be authority figures on the matter. Second, this prize may not actually be worth anything. If this is a prize for the best state government economist in Idaho (excluding economists living in Boise), I wouldn't care much about the views of its past winners. Third, we have no idea if the economists even chose acme. Since many economists work in academia, perhaps Acme is just the national retirement plan for college professors. This would defeat the argument, since if the economists, didn't actually choose the plan, the conclusion falls apart.

D rests on the third attack. If the economists never actively selected the plan, that no longer shows that economists think that plan was best for them.

There are a couple issues with C, but the biggest is that the argument never claims that the experts support the main conclusion. Rather the author claims that the experts behavior indicates that the conclusion is correct, but it doesn't say the economists directly agree with or endorse the conclusion.