Evaluation wanted: "Argument" essay

[InvisibleHand]

Hello GradCafe,

Please find my argument essay below. Any attempts at amateur grading or criticism would be much appreciated, as valuating your own essays on something like this is basically impossible. Thank you for your time and energy.

"In surveys Mason City residents rank water sports (swimming, boating, and fishing) among their favorite recreational activities. The Mason River flowing through the city is rarely used for these pursuits, however, and the city park department devotes little of its budget to maintaining riverside recreational facilities. For years there have been complaints from residents about the quality of the river's water and the river's smell. In response, the state has recently announced plans to clean up Mason River. Use of the river for water sports is, therefore, sure to increase. The city government should for that reason devote more money in this year's budget to riverside recreational facilities.

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on the assumptions and what the implications are if the assumptions prove unwarranted."

The conclusion that the city government should devote more money in its budget to riverside recreational facilities rests on a bevy of assumptions that are at best dubious. According to the memo’s author, the use of the river for recreational activities is “sure to increase” because the state announced plans to clean up the river. Meanwhile, the author says, city residents rank water sports as among their favorite activities and have long complained about the quality of the river water the state is about to clean-up. And they have rarely used the river in the past.

These background statements about how much the residents enjoy water activities and how likely they are to use the river as a source of recreation once the state cleans up the river, even if all true, do not necessarily support the conclusion that the city government should devote more resources to riverside recreational facilities. Suppose, generously, that resident use of the river for recreation stands poised to increase once the state cleans up the river. It is possible that private vendors would compete to provide recreation facilities alongside the river. These private facilities, through the forces of competition, may well be better for the residents who wish to recreate in the river than the facilities the government would construct. And these private recreational facilities would not directly cost the city government anything. Hence, even if all the background claims leading up to the conclusion are 100% right, it would be at best hasty to conclude that the city should provide such facilities. The city would be well-advised to study the possibility of private vendors providing these facilities, perhaps by asking the local chamber of commerce whether any of their members would be likely to provide these facilities as river use increased. And even this “private sector first” approach assumes that those who would recreate in the river desire some facility that is at present lacking, which is itself a contestable assumption that could be empirically examined by the city through a survey of its residents.

But is not at all clear that recreational use of the river is “sure to increase” based on the evidence presented. Even if residents of Mason City enjoy recreational water activities, they may not regard the river as the best outlet for these aquatic outings. Maybe they enjoy a local water park, a nearby ocean beach, or pools either at shared facilities or in their own backyards.  They may well enjoy these outlets for their water recreation so much that they would not substitute even the cleanest of rivers for their place in their recreation schedules. Their complaints about the water’s quality may reflect concerns about the water’s impact on the environment or, in the case of the smell, the degrading effect the water’s quality has on the quality of life of residents regardless of whether they engage in water-based recreation. If this were the case, then the state’s efforts to improve the quality of the river may not necessarily have any impact on the use of the river for recreation. That said, the Mason City government would likely be able to gather information about whether this is the case by appending additional questions on the subject to the survey they distribute to residents. Such questions could ask how residents currently satisfy any desire for water recreation and whether they viewed the river as a viable alternative if it were cleaned up and adequate facilities provided.

The validity of the author’s inference that residents necessarily even like water activities to a meaningful extent, however, depends on the specifics of the survey’s question about recreation. And the author notes that the survey asked residents to rank water sports. But the position of water sports in a rank-order depends entirely on what the other options are. Suppose, for instance, that the survey asked participants from a list of: aerobic exercise, weightlifting, or reading. Residents could rank water sports as the first and most preferred activity on that list of four options, but nonetheless spend zero minutes a year engaged in water sports. For instance, residents could prefer drinking wine with friends or going to the movies more than any of those activities. In such a case of a poorly-designed “recreational rank” question, little information about how residents spend their time would actually be gathered from the survey question, since the other options in the rank-order question were not options residents tend to consider when deciding how to spend their time.

Meanwhile, even if the question about recreation were well-designed, the validity of any survey data on how residents spend their recreational time depends on how the survey was distributed. If the survey were distributed to a representative sample of city residents, and each question were well-designed, then the inferences would be valid. But if the residents who answered the survey questions were not representative of the city as a whole, then the survey results would likely be spurious. Suppose, for instance, that survey respondents were likely to be retirees who have lots of time on their hands to engage in activities like answering surveys from the city governments. Then the survey results would over-represent retirees and under-represent the rest of the population. If retirees had a disproportionate tendency to, say, go fishing or spending time on boats (as seems plausible), then the survey would overstate the extent to which city residents as a whole spend their time engaged in water sports. As a result, then, the implication that the overall population of the city values water sports as a recreational outlet would not necessarily follow from survey data that at a glance suggests as much.

The city’s manager’s conclusion that the city should spend more money on recreational facilities on the riverside depends on many assumptions that may or may not be valid. Even if one grants that each of his background statements and assertions are true, his conclusion does not necessarily follow from them: private facilities may be superior to those of the government and would cost the city government nothing. But even his background statements, based on survey data and their own sets of assumptions, do not necessarily stand on their own. The argument’s pieces are themselves tenuous, as is the argument as a whole