The following appeared as part of an editorial in a campus newspaper:

"With an increasing demand for highly skilled workers, this nation will soon face a serious labor shortage. New positions in technical and professional occupations are increasing rapidly, while at the same time the total labor force is growing slowly. Moreover, the government is proposing to cut funds for aid to education in the near future."

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion, be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion. (used with permission from mba.com)


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My response:

This argument claims that with the increase of highly skilled workers, this nation will soon face a labor shortage. He provides further reason for labor shortage by stating the increase in technical and professional occupations and the decrease in total labor force. He also adds that government is proposing to cut funds for aid to education in the near future. This argument relies on the assumptions for which there are no clear evidence. Therefore, this argument is rather weak and unconvincing and has several flaws.

First, argument readily assumes that with the increase in demand for highly skilled workers, nation will face a labor shortage. This statement is a stretch and not substantiated in any way. He fails to state the reason behind his assumption. It can be possible that with increase in demand for highly skilled workers, more labor will be looking for skill enhancement so that they can acquire those high skilled jobs. In addition, the author fails to realize that it could be possible that with the increase in demand for highly skilled workers, there could be a considerable decrease in demand for low skilled workers. Hence, even with the slow growth of total labor force, these unskilled labor can gain enough skills to fill in for high skilled jobs.

Second, the author states that new position in technical and professional occupation is increasing rapidly and total labor is growing slowly. The argument fails to provide proper statistics for this phenomena. It could be possible that current volume of total labor be much greater than the total volume of technical and professional occupations. Hence, even a slow growth can possibly satisfy the rapidly increasing demand of technical and professional occupations. This argument would have been lot more sound and convincing, if the author had given us the exact numbers of increasing demand and slowing growth rather than using vague terms like rapidly increase and slow growth.

Third, the author states that government is proposing fund cuts for aid to education. This way author assumes that acquiring necessary skills is possible only through gaining education. In fact, most of the skills necessary for a particular job is acquired through an on-job training.

In summary, this argument is flawed and hence unconvincing, this argument could have been considerably strengthened, if the author had mentioned all the relevant facts and statistics without making inaccurate assumptions. In order to assess a certain situation, one has to have full knowledge of all the contributing factors.
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Any suggestions, curses will be welcomed.