"为我所用"小组第十六次作业argument143

rienziUID: 2402391

TOPIC: ARGUMENT143 - The following appeared as a letter to the editor of a national newspaper.
"Your recent article on corporate downsizing* in the United States is misleading. The article gives the mistaken impression that many competent workers who lost jobs as a result of downsizing face serious economic hardship, often for years, before finding other suitable employment. But this impression is contradicted by a recent report on the United States economy, which found that since 1992 far more jobs have been created than have been eliminated. The report also demonstrates that many of those who lost their jobs have found new employment. Two-thirds of the newly created jobs have been in industries that tend to pay above-average wages, and the vast majority of these jobs are full-time."
*Downsizing is the process in which corporations deliberately reduce the number of their employees.

WORDS: 433          TIME: 00:30:00          DATE: 2008-4-10 14:54:46



    The author of this passage criticizes the view of an article, which alleges that the lost of jobs of those competent workers was due to the slipdown of economy of the United States in the past few years, as misleading. He quotes the result of a recent report which shows that far more jobs have been created than eliminated since 1992, and then he explains it to support his conclusion. But through careful scrutiny, it is not weird to find some fatal fallacies from his discussion.
    Firstly, the author fails to mention the details of the report quoted by him. He does not tell us that who led the survey and put out the result and what are the specific numbers of jobs that had been found and lost since 1992. Without all these details, nothing can be concluded by it. We can imagine that the report is done by some particular purposes which aim to misleading someone of something. And we can also imagine that the statistical methods of the sponsor of the report is so wrong that it can not tell us the truth. In these cases, the result of the report loses its power to support the arthor's conclusion.
    Secondly, even if the report tells us the truth, we can not make the judgment that it can support the final conclusion of the arthor rightly. The author fails to concern other factors, for example, the increasement of population, which can also cause largely lost of jobs and recession of economy. As he did not think about this factor, none of data of population since 1992 has been presented. But we can make a assumption that the population has increased largely since then, with no rise of death rate. In this case, the competition of job finding will be more serious then before, and it will not be weird to see that many workers, even those competent ones, lost their jobs.
    Thirdly, as has been showed by the author, we can see that the creation and lost of jobs are in a quick circulation. No matter whether these jobs can pay above-average wages or are full-time or not, we can not conclusdes that the workers were in an employed condition during that time. May they found and lost job quickly, and could not even feed himself during the job-losing period.
Without stable job condition, those workers will be surely in a serious ecnomic hardship.
    Given the discussion above, the author's conclusion is ineffective. More factors should be concerned and more survey should be done to support his conclusion or made my