We typically read “The Ant and the Grasshopper” as a morality tale, but it’s also a story about cognition. By partying all summer instead of gathering food for the winter, the grasshopper succumbed to what economists call “temporal discounting.”[1] He overvalued the now—and undervalued (that is, discounted) the later. When this bias grips our thinking, we often make regrettable decisions.
