The following appeared in an internal memo circulated amongst the partners of a small graphic design firm:“When the economy was growing, there were more graphics jobs than there were designers and many designers could make more money working as independen

The author of this argument has failed to convince us that the graphic design firm will save a lot of money by cutting back the salaries of all designers in order to cope with the market rates. The argument is based on questionable assumptions and a faulty line of reasoning, a fact which renders it over-simplistic and unconvincing.

First of all, the author is engaged in a spurious analogy assumption in relating the growth of the economy of the whole market with the economy of a graphic design company. The author does not supply any figures regarding the market growth, company growth and salaries paid. The author should clarify whether the company was randomly hiring all graduates, or picking out the best ones in order to justify the higher salaries for which we are also left without any numbers. Were the salaries higher than the rest of the graphic design market or just relative higher within the graphic design firm? In addition, the author does not specify a time frame in which the mentioned scenario takes place. In order to draw a safe conclusion and correlate the facts, we have to be sure that the market shrinking is not temporary due to other transient effects.

Next, the author suggests that the company should cut back salaries of all designers on staff to match current market rates. There is no any lucid evidence about the level of the market woe in order to draw a safe conclusion. Is the market plunge recent and temporary or is it an ongoing effect for the last months or years? Furthermore, regarding the savings from cutting salaries back, the author does not clarify the exact amount, or at least a percentage figure, of money expected to be saved by such a policy. Moreover, the author suggests that only designers' salaries are to be cut down in order to match current market rates. Again, no further explanations are given about how many employers and designers are working in the firm. It is kind of ironic for a graphic design firm to cut down salaries of its core members and not from less significant positions. What if, firing some managers or secretaries would solve the problem without affecting the designers salary? In addition, if the suggested policy is to bring salaries at market rates, there is no guarantee that the designers will not exasperate, paving the path to lower productivity, resignations or transfers to other competitive graphic design firms. This in turn, may ruin the firm's reputation and economy.

Finally, the author engages in a false analogy assumption by considering service and manufacturing companies, in terms of functionality and productivity, equal to a graphic design firm. Service sector or manufacturing economies may be fundamentally different from graphic design economy in terms of both financial and employment scale. For example, manufacturing or service sector economy may had a severe economic crisis in the last couple of years and was forced to take drastic measures like lowering wages and replacing workers with machines that, in contrast, cannot really replace graphic designers. Furthermore, the "successfully cutting wages" statement is ambiguous. In what time frame was the success sampled? Was cutting wages the only change in these economies? The statement is too abstract as it stands.

To sum up, based on unsubstantiated assumptions and poor evidence, the author's reasoning does not provide concrete support for the stated conclusion. If the author had provided more information relating the number of employers, scale and severity of the market plunge, a more solid justification of why adjusting designers' wage only and more information on the exemplified economies presented, it would have been more thorough and convincing.