McGregor: Business book trends often signal the bursting of market bubbles. Real estate titles filled the U.S. bestseller list in...
GMAT Critical Reasoning : (CR) Questions
McGregor: Business book trends often signal the bursting of market bubbles. Real estate titles filled the U.S. bestseller list in 2007, before the bubble in U.S. real estate values burst. And in the 1990s there was a sharp increase in the number of titles about technology stocks before the market in technology stocks collapsed. This shows that when books are written in response to investment trends, the time it takes for them to reach publication is typically the time it takes for a growing bubble to burst.
Levinson: You are ignoring the effects that business books can have on business. It could be that business books lead too many people into speculation in particular areas, thus triggering further inflation of a market that then collapses.
Levinson responds to McGregor by:
Passage Analysis:
| Text from Passage | Analysis |
| McGregor: Business book trends often signal the bursting of market bubbles. |
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| Real estate titles filled the U.S. bestseller list in 2007, before the bubble in U.S. real estate values burst. |
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| And in the 1990s there was a sharp increase in the number of titles about technology stocks before the market in technology stocks collapsed. |
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| This shows that when books are written in response to investment trends, the time it takes for them to reach publication is typically the time it takes for a growing bubble to burst. |
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| Levinson: You are ignoring the effects that business books can have on business. |
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| It could be that business books lead too many people into speculation in particular areas, thus triggering further inflation of a market that then collapses. |
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Argument Flow:
McGregor presents a pattern from two historical examples (real estate 2007, tech stocks 1990s) to argue that book publication timing coincidentally matches bubble bursting. Levinson counters by suggesting McGregor missed a key factor - that books might actually cause the crashes rather than just signal them.
Main Conclusion:
There are two competing explanations: McGregor thinks books accidentally signal when bubbles will burst due to publication timing, while Levinson thinks books might actually cause bubbles to burst by encouraging more speculation.
Logical Structure:
This is a disagreement about causation vs correlation. McGregor sees correlation (books happen to come out when bubbles burst), while Levinson suggests causation (books cause the bubbles to burst by influencing investor behavior).
Prethinking:
Question type:
Misc - This is asking us to identify HOW Levinson responds to McGregor's argument. We need to characterize the nature of Levinson's response technique.
Precision of Claims
McGregor claims business books 'signal' bubble bursts through timing coincidence. Levinson claims books might actually 'cause' crashes by influencing behavior. The key distinction is between correlation (McGregor) versus causation (Levinson).
Strategy
For this question type, we need to analyze what Levinson is doing rhetorically. We should look at how Levinson structures his counter-argument: he points out something McGregor overlooked, then offers an alternative explanation that reverses the cause-and-effect relationship. We want to capture the essence of this argumentative technique.
Suggesting that McGregor's position is implausible: This isn't what Levinson does. He doesn't say McGregor's theory is unrealistic or unlikely to be true. Instead, he acknowledges McGregor's observations but offers an additional perspective that McGregor missed. Levinson doesn't attack the plausibility of the correlation McGregor observed.
Providing a counterexample to McGregor's generalization: Levinson doesn't give us a specific case where McGregor's pattern (books appearing before market crashes) doesn't hold true. He's not disputing the examples of real estate books in 2007 or tech books in the 1990s. Instead, he's reinterpreting what those examples might mean.
Suggesting that McGregor has failed to consider the possibility of a certain causal relationship: This perfectly captures what Levinson does. He explicitly says McGregor is 'ignoring the effects that business books can have on business' and then proposes that books might actually cause crashes by encouraging speculation. McGregor only considered books as signals, but Levinson points out he overlooked books as potential causes.
Arguing that the relationship described by McGregor is not a causal relationship: This mischaracterizes Levinson's response. McGregor actually doesn't claim a causal relationship - he suggests books 'signal' bubbles due to timing coincidence. Levinson isn't denying causation; he's actually proposing that there might be causation running in the opposite direction.
Describing an analogous situation in which McGregor's generalization does not hold: Levinson doesn't provide a parallel scenario or different example where book trends don't predict market crashes. He works with the same examples McGregor used but offers a different interpretation of the underlying mechanism.