Occupy Wall Street and Toulmin

Political movements are hot topics just now, what with the 2012 presidential election just around the corner. The “grass roots” Tea Party movement seems to be copied, in a way, by the recent development by “Occupy Wall Street”, a group of left-wing protestors who are against Capitalism in the United States. The article I decided to analyze using the Toulmin method is called “Occupy Wall Street: The Right Focus”, and uses a pro/con approach to analyze both sides of the argument.

The first claim made in the “Pro” side of this article is that “Economic inequality has been growing steadily for three decades”. This statement is backed up with evidence in the form of statistics collected by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. The warrant is pretty obvious, and is one that the American audience does generally share, and that is that economic inequality is not something we want to encourage. However, the next claim the article makes, that “before the late 1970s, inequality had been falling for five decades”, is supported with less evidence than the first (although it is mentioned that the years during which economic inequality dropped were the Golden Years of Capitalism), and the warrant is unclear. Perhaps it is that capitalism can economic equality are not mutually exclusive.

This was in interesting article, but not one I found to be terribly convincing. Perhaps if the author used stronger warrants and evidence to back up his claims, it would be a more convincing argument. However, this article is posted on the website for “Bloomburg Businessweek”, a website that focuses on the information and relevance to the world of business that stories offer. Since this article is written to provide information rather than to convince, I think that strong warrants are not necessarily needed, so long as the evidence is there to support the claim.