Tedious Soporific points to a quote from an Economist article on Brad DeLong’s blog. The article gives President Bush a hard time for taking credit when perhaps credit is not due. I don’t think this is really fair – politicians constantly get the blame even when blame is obviously not due, so why shouldn’t they take credit when it might conceivably be due?
The article has more harsh words for President Bush:
Gary Clyde Hufbauer of the Institute for International Economics (IIE), a Washington think-tank, warns against the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. That won’t bother Mr Bush, who is not known for his command of Latin….
I’d like to help out President Bush and everybody else who didn’t do enough high school Latin to translate “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”. Word by word, we have:
“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” therefore means:
“Send moonshine by mail therefore the moon-shines on the auto-gyro”.
I can see the logical fallacy in that.
Comments
Heh. Good one.