Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

The following appeared in a newspaper editorial during the holiday shopping season:

"Americans spend far too much of their time buying and consuming non-essential goods. Studies show that, on average Americans spend over a quarter of their leisure time shopping. As such, it is no secret why America is losing its competitive edge relative to other countries. Instead of spending their time productively, Americans are wasting time through frivolous consumption. In order to counteract this trend, Americans should spend more time focused on personal and communal development--by, for example, pursuing educational advancement or participating in volunteer opportunities."


The argument states that the Americans spend a lot of their time buying and consuming non-essential goods. As a result America is loosing its competitive edge over other countries. Hence argument suggests that Americans should spend more time focused on personal and communal development. The reasoning provided to substantiate is very much poor and leaves a lot of gaps. Hence in my opinion the argument is very weak.
First of all, the argument states that Americans spend too much of their time buying and consuming non-essential goods. The argument tries to substantiate this claim by stating that average Americans spend over a quarter of their leisure time shopping. However this particular reasoning provided by author to substantiate his claim is very poor. The author needs to state the leisure time available to average Americans. He also needs to provide information about ideal amount time, the citizens of a country should be spending for the purpose of shopping. As author does not provide any such information, it is not possible to test the validity of the argument of the author.
Moreover, author further states America is loosing its competitive edge relative to other countries because Americans spend far too much of their time in buying and non essential goods. However author does not make any effort to substantiate this claim. Author needs too provide the data about competitiveness of America and other countries as well as comparison of the behaviour of Americans with behaviour of citizens of other countries before making this claim. The author also needs to provide reasoning to relate the competitive edge with behaviour of Americans. Lacking all this data, the argument appears very weak.
Furthermore the author reasons that time spent by American in shopping and consuming non essential goods is responsible for loss of competitive edge. Nevertheless, author does not make any effort to provide any historical relationship between competitive edge and behavior of the citizens. If someone claims that America has been most competitive country in the world for more than a century, despite the fact that Americans have been spending a lot of time in shopping and consuming non-essential goods, the argument is substantially weakened.
Finally author states that Americans should spend more time focused on personal and communal development and expects that doing so should improve competitive edge of America. However author does not provide any reasoning to substantiate the relationship between time spent on personal and communal development and competitive edge of a country.
To conclude argument appears to be very short as long as all this gaps are not addressed. The author needs to ensure that he provide the data about time spent by Americans in shopping, the leisure time available to the Americans and ideal amount of time Americans should be spending. Also he needs to provide the relationship between the behavior of citizens and the competitive edge of a country in order to make the argument stronger.
[/list][/list][/b]