If you been following my presentations in public and my writing on the topic of housing, you’ll know that I often deploy the “Bake More Bread” analogy. Arches Magazine, the regular publication of my alma matter the University of Puget Sound features me in their fall edition and I’m quoted putting it this way:

If you have a bread shortage, and the baker is only allowed to bake 10 loaves of bread, and he is slicing them thinner and thinner but people keep coming for the bread, the price is going to keep going up,” he contends. “Adding taxes to the bread or setting aside a few slices for people who have less money is not going to solve the shortage. What you need to do is let the baker bake more bread.

On Twitter, The Rent Controller has made a great text graphic of the various notions and language that the analogy can produce, like “bread control” and “inclusionary baking.” I thought it was clever, and I think the analogy speaks to people’s everyday, common sense notions about supply and demand. People, even opposed or worried about growth, understand the basic concept of scarcity.

I think they also understand the basic concept of fairness. Analogies don’t solve problems. But what they can do is create a bit of cognitive dissonance, a disruption from a syllogism that keeps leading to the wrong answer. Sometimes following an analogy all the way to it’s logical conclusion can reveal the absurdity of the idea being critiqued, like that we ought to make housing more expensive to make it cheaper. Satire functions this way as well. So if you like the graphic, post to it to Facebook and share it. It might help.