The widespread staff reductions in a certain region' s economy are said to be causing people who still have their jobs to cut back on new purchases as though they, too, had become economically distressed. Clearly, however, actual spending by such people is undiminished, because there has been no unusual increase in the amount of money held by those people in savings account. The argument in the passage proceeds by doing which one of the following? ['concluding that since an expected consequence of a supposed development did not occur, that development itself did not take place', 'concluding that since the evidence concerning a supposed change is ambiguous, it is most likely that no change is actually taking place', 'arguing that since two alternative developments exhaust all the plausible possibilities, one of those developments occurred and the other did not', "arguing that since people's economic behavior is guided by economic self-interest, only misinformation or error will cause people to engage in economic behavior that harms them economically"]