Moral Story Of The Day

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“THE GOOSE AND THE GOLDEN EGG” (AESOP)

“The Goose and the Golden Egg” is a fable authored by the legendary storyteller Aesop, who lived in ancient Greece ca. 620 –560 BC. Many details about Aesop’s origins are unknown, yet it is widely believed that he was a slave from Phrygia who came to live in Samos. The corpus of moralistic fables attributed to Aesop has been passed on throughout the centuries from antiquity to the present. Although the fables have had varied significance according to the contexts in which the tales were read, Aesop’s use of animal narrators and symbolic natural elements to subtly illustrate the ironies and lessons of the human condition have in many ways remained timeless.

“The Goose and the Golden Egg” tells of a man and his wife who had a goose that laid a single golden egg for them each day. As the man’s wealth grew, he became dissatisfied with only a single egg each day and wished for more. Assuming the goose was filled with gold inside, the man foolishly killed it. Upon finding that the goose bore no treasure inside of her, he remarked to himself, “While chasing after hopes of a treasure, I lost the profit I held in my hands!” (adapted from Gibbs 2002). The moral of the story is that those who are greedy and seek to obtain more than they deserve risk losing everything they have.

The phrase “killing the goose for the golden egg” has evolved as a widespread idiomatic expression used in reference to events or actions that produce an immediate desirable result with potentially disastrous long-term consequences and is particularly common as a proverbial reference to shortsighted economic policies within the realm of banking and finance.