Week 15 — Trade, Poverty, and the Final Choose-the-Tool Test — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 14 of the term, and the last one — work out who gives up less in a trade, read a fall in poverty for what it shows and does not, choose the right course tool for a new question, and explain a poverty headline to a cousin.

This week you learned that every real economy is a mixed economy, that comparative advantage runs on opportunity cost rather than speed, that trade brings both aggregate gains and distributional costs, that poverty and inequality are different measures, and that the World Bank's International Poverty Line is a definition with a price base. Week 12 kept a correlation apart from a cause, and Week 13 compared cases on a plan; this assignment puts both to work one last time. In this assignment you work two short problems, interpret each one, choose a course tool for a new question, and explain a poverty headline to someone who has never studied political science. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will work two short problems, interpret each one, and choose a course tool for a new question. Every country, region, and household you meet here is illustrative: none is real, and no real person or current officeholder belongs in it.

Work these two problems, showing how you got each count:

In a made-up country, 1 crate of grain takes 12 hours of work and 1 bolt of cloth takes 4 hours. How many bolts of cloth does the country give up to make 1 crate of grain?
A made-up region of 40 households has 6 households below its poverty line in the first survey and 2 in the second. By how many percentage points did the share below the line fall?

Beside each count, add the interpretation that makes it political science:

Problem 1, the trade. A second made-up country makes 1 crate of grain in 6 hours and 1 bolt of cloth in 3 hours. Work out what that second country gives up for 1 crate of grain, then say which country should lean toward grain and why opportunity cost, not speed, decides it. Then imagine the two countries trade, and the first country's grain farms shrink. Name the aggregate gain and the distributional cost in your scenario, state the free-trade case and the managed-trade case at full strength, each as its own defenders would put it, and label at least one of your premises empirical and one normative. Do not say which side is right; say what a person would have to value to choose each.
Problem 2, the poverty read. Say whether your region's poverty and inequality must have moved together, and why not. Then read one real, pinned figure with the data scaffold: the World Bank counts around 831 million people in extreme poverty in 2025, down from around 2.3 billion in 1990, measured against the International Poverty Line of 3.00 dollars a day in 2021 international prices. Say what is measured, over whom and when, what the count shows, what it does not show, and whether it shows a correlation or a cause. Finish by explaining why a figure built on 2.15 dollars a day is not the current line.

Choose the tool

This is the last assignment of the course, so it ends with a synthesis step. A made-up city council asks: "Two neighboring towns in our region have the same size, the same main industry, and the same schools, but one has far fewer households below the poverty line. What explains the difference?" Choose the one course tool that fits this question best: a most-similar comparison, the data scaffold, or the collective-action logic. In 4–6 sentences, justify your choice from the details of the question, and explain why one plausible alternative fits less well. Say what your chosen tool could show and what it could not.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin sees a headline that says the count of the world's extremely poor jumped when the World Bank updated its line, and says, "So the world got poorer." Write a 3–5 sentence message to your cousin that explains, in everyday words, what a poverty line is, why raising the line can raise a count without anyone's income falling, and names one limit of what a single count can tell you. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coach explaining a new fitness standard to a team. Model answer: "The team made its fitness standard stricter, so more of you fall below the bar this season. Nobody got slower; the bar moved. The new number tells you who clears the new bar, not why some runners improved, so keep your own times from last season to compare."

Use that pattern for your message to your cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Show how you got each count. A reader should be able to reproduce both counts from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

After you finish, reread your work and revise at least one choice, label, data read, or explanation. Then add a short reflection (3–4 sentences) on one of two options of equal weight, your choice: (a) which choice, label, or read you changed and why the new version is better; or (b) where your first draft read a correlation as if it showed a cause, or treated trade's losers as proof against its gains, and how you caught it.

Looking ahead to the final. The final exam comes in Week 16, finals week. To prepare, use the Final study guide, the Final Practice Exam, and the exam-prep tutorial in the finals-week module. The choose-the-tool step you practise here, matching a question to a course method and saying why another fits less well, is the skill those materials ask you to use across the whole course.

Deliverables

Submit a single analysis file containing:

the two counts, each with the values and the operation shown;
your trade interpretation (the second country's opportunity cost, which country should lean toward grain and why, the aggregate gain and the distributional cost, both policy cases at full strength, and premises labelled by kind);
your poverty read (why poverty and inequality need not move together, the data-scaffold read of the World Bank's count, and why 2.15 dollars a day is not the current line);
your tool choice with its reason and the weaker alternative;
your message to your cousin; and
your revision note with the reflection option you chose.

Keep it to roughly two pages; accuracy and clear reasoning matter more than length.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about four minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the two countries' trade with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the arithmetic, the interpretation, the tool choice, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Cite the World Bank's figures only as this week's materials pin them, with the line and its price base, and keep every example free of living politicians, current officeholders, and any current tariff, treaty, or migration bill. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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