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Difficulty: HardIdentifying Analogous Situations

In an attempt to reduce residential carbon emissions, a municipality introduced a 'green building' tax credit that rewarded developers strictly based on the number of solar panels installed per square foot of roof space. In response, developers began constructing significantly larger homes with expansive, poorly insulated roofs simply to accommodate massive, low-efficiency solar arrays and claim the highest tier of the tax credit. The net result was that these sprawling new constructions consumed vastly more energy for heating and cooling than older, moderately sized homes, actively worsening the environmental issue the policy was designed to mitigate.

Which of the following scenarios is most analogous to the dynamic described in the passage regarding the municipality's tax credit?

  1. A
    A state government offers substantial financial subsidies for purchasing electric vehicles in order to lower overall carbon emissions, which leads to a massive surge in electric car sales and a subsequent sharp decline in greenhouse gases from the transportation sector.
  2. A software company introduces a bonus structure that rewards programmers based entirely on the total number of lines of code they write in order to increase overall productivity. The programmers respond by writing highly verbose, unnecessarily complex code, resulting in software that is bloated, slow, and less efficient than before.Answer
  3. C
    A city council attempts to increase the availability of affordable housing by strictly limiting the maximum rent landlords can charge per square foot, causing landlords to cease maintaining their properties and leading to widespread urban decay.
  4. D
    A school district mandates rigorous standardized testing to improve educational outcomes across all its schools, but because standardized tests inherently reflect socioeconomic biases, the policy ultimately exacerbates educational inequality rather than resolving it.
  5. E
    A hospital administration implements demanding sanitation protocols aiming to eliminate post-surgical infections. The surgical teams successfully eliminate the infections, but the nursing staff complains that the new protocols are too time-consuming, resulting in lower overall patient satisfaction scores.

Answer

The correct answer is the scenario involving the software company, as it perfectly mirrors the structural dynamic of an incentive based on a narrow metric leading to behavior that actively undermines the overarching goal.
The software company scenario accurately parallels the passage. In both cases, an authority implements a narrow, quantifiable metric to achieve a broader beneficial goal (solar panels for reduced emissions; lines of code for productivity). Furthermore, in both cases, the subjects strictly optimize their behavior to meet the metric (building larger, inefficient houses; writing highly verbose code), and this specific compliance actively worsens the original problem the authority was trying to solve (increased energy consumption; slower, less efficient software).

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the passage to identify the core structural dynamic.
Goal: Reduce emissions. Metric: Solar panels per square foot. Action: Build larger, inefficient roofs to fit more panels. Consequence: Increased energy consumption, undermining the original goal.
Identifying the abstract relational structure is necessary to evaluate the analogous scenarios.
2
Abstract the specific details into a general logical formula.
An authority implements a narrow metric to incentivize a broad positive outcome. Subjects optimize strictly for the metric, and this specific optimization actively exacerbates the exact negative condition the authority sought to mitigate.
Creating a subject-neutral framework prevents falling for traps that use familiar wording but different logic.
3
Evaluate the options against the abstracted formula.
The software company scenario matches perfectly: Goal (productivity) -> Metric (lines of code) -> Exploitation (verbose code) -> Undermined Goal (bloated, inefficient software).
Only one option will accurately reflect the intended mechanism of perverse compliance.

Key Concept

Identifying Parallel Flaws and Mechanisms in Application
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Topics

Identifying Analogous Situations

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