The perils of glorifying a fallacious question with an answer

I was elsewhere and too preoccupied with an urgent personal project last June when fellow Times columnist Prof. Leonor Briones came out with a very provocative column, “If we are so good in English, why aren’t we rich?” (https://tinyurl.com/kzxdc74). I therefore missed reading that column and, coming across it only now, I must say that I was taken aback and distressed by the sheer fallaciousness of its thesis.

In fairness to Prof. Briones, she didn’t come up with that question herself. By her own account, it was a paraphrase of a question posed to her when she was interviewed by a foreign correspondent of a newspaper with the largest circulation in a foreign country, and I don’t intend to fault her for her informative, if tangentially argued, response to it. But I do think that she could have provided greater clarity to her response by first pointing out—both to that foreign correspondent and to Times readers—that the question was a fallacious statement to begin with.