ABSTRACT
It is part of human experience to learn how the past affects the present, how the moment for taking action can be gone in an instant, and how what is done today shapes the future, whether we like it or not. Among the fables credited to Aesop, the Greek slave and teller of tales, is the story of the ant and the grasshopper. In the fable the grasshopper has spent the summer months singing and enjoying the heat while the ant worked to store up food for winter. When that season arrives, the grasshopper finds itself short of food and hungry. Upon asking the ant for food the grasshopper is rebuked for its idleness. The moral of the tale is by way of warning about individual fecklessness: not being prepared or thinking ahead for when times may be hard. This and the other fables were first printed in English by William Caxton in 1484, one of the first books printed let alone printed in the newly settled English language. It has remained in print for over 500 years. J.S. Mill read it as a small child, in Greek. It has been told, retold, extended, turned into cartoons, even ‘Disneyfied’. It gained new life with the near financial collapse of the Western economic model in the 2000s, when Martin Wolf, an economics writer on the Financial Times, retold the tale thus: the ants are the industrious societies (the Germans, Chinese and Japanese) who prosper, while the grasshoppers are the consumer societies (the American, British, Greek, Irish and Spanish) who are in trouble. 1
