False Cause
A “False Cause” or “Not a Cause For a Cause” fallacy ignores the difference between causation and correlation. Causation is when an event causes another event to occur, whereas correlation means one event follows another event. For example, in the summer, murder goes up; in the summer ice cream sales go up. Does ice cream make people kill? Just because one event follows another event and may even appear to be connected does not mean it is a cause-and-effect relationship. This type of fallacy attempts to use coincidence as evidence to persuade the audience that two separate events are related.
Executive Director Jesse Panuccio of the state Department of Economic Opportunity, asserted that the number of jobs is growing which has lead to fewer people filing for unemployment
benefits, what Panuccio failed to mention was the computerized system for filing claims, filled with glitches preventing people from receiving unemployment. Seventy percent of people with legitimate claims received their benefits with others having to wait up to a month. Panuccio may or may not have known about the computer glitch, but this is still a fallacy. Panuccio interpreted the decrease in people filing for benefits as an increase in the number of Jobs. This logic does work, however, in this case, there was an outside variable that altered the data. This outside variable causes this logical reasoning to become a fallacy.