Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Nope, no more gold there.

The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department.

—Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

So, you've got a source of benefit or profit. It doesn't provide a lot at any one time, but it's constant and guaranteed -- it'll always be there for you, and it will never run out.

But for some people a little all the time, forever, isn't good enough. They want all of it, right now, and screw tomorrow. So they decide to muck around with the source -- crack it open or change how it works -- with the intent of maximizing their immediate returns. Only when they do that, they gain nothing and it stops working.

This is Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs -- destroying a source of slow and/or small but guaranteed long-term profit or advantage out of a desire for larger, more immediate gains. In some cases this is because of a fallacious belief that the source, whatever it is, already contains all the possible profit or benefit it can produce and is simply doling it out a bit at a time. Sometimes it comes of an arrogant (but false) belief that the one making the changes understands exactly what's happening and knows just what's needed to make it produce even more of what they want. Spoiler: they don't.

When it shows up in a story, it is almost always An Aesop about impatience and Greed.

The Trope Namer is, unsurprisingly, a fable from Aesop.

See also Solid Gold Poop, Step Three: Profit.

Examples of Killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs include:

Film

  • The original fable was adapted by Russian filmmakers in 1994's Assia and the Hen with the Golden Eggs.
  • Averted in 1990's Pretty Woman. Richard Gere plays a corporate raider character, who has up until this point made himself very rich precisely by buying and killing multiple Golden Geese belonging to other people. After Vivian asks him an Armor-Piercing Question about what he creates as a result of all his effort, however, he decides to partner with the owner of his current target and run it for the long term instead.
  • Chicken Run shows this trope, albeit with ordinary chicken eggs instead of goose eggs. The Tweedys run a farm where they collect eggs from the chickens as a rooster named Fowler guards them. As soon as one hen stops laying, she's taken to "the chop" and eaten for dinner. Mr. Tweedy is fine with this way of life because it's how his family has done chicken farming for generations. His wife, on the other hand, is tired of being "poor" and decides to slaughter all the chickens for a new pie business. Thanks to the chickens escaping in the climax, the Tweedys are left with a blown-up farm and no poultry for eggs or pies.

Literature

  • This is a Discussed Trope in Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story "Pâté de Foie Gras". The narrator has a goose that lays golden eggs, and non-invasive tests show that there's something in its liver that takes radiation from the environment and produces the gold (which provides a Title Drop in the story), but he's worried that any invasive examination, even a biopsy, would "kill" the process. The story ends with an appeal to the readers to figure out what's going on. (The story's Wikipedia page gives away part of the solution.)
  • The 13 Clocks had a woman who cried gemstones whenever she was sad. Unfortunately by the time the heroes came around, her tears had dried up completely due to people telling her so many sad stories. However... she also cried gems when she laughs hard only for them to turn back into water after two weeks. Long enough for the heroes' purpose.
  • In Misery, Paul Sheldon discusses this when Annie presses him for details on the book she's coercing him to write. Paul already isn't in a great mood after she chopped off his foot and is trying to bribe him with a hot fudge sundae as an apology. He shouts that he can't tell her what happens because he doesn't know, saying that if she keeps pushing like the farmer with the golden eggs, there will be nothing left of him.
  • In the first book of Gail Carson Levine's Princess Tales, The Fairy's Mistake, shows a take on this with the fairy tale "Diamonds and Toads". A girl named Rosella gets a blessing where precious stones fall from our mouth while her twin sister Myrtle is cursed where bugs fly out of her mouth. When a prince marries her, it's not because Harold loves her, but rather because he sees the dollar signs. Cue him making her read books for days so he can fill the royal coffers, until she falls ill. Myrtle agrees to help in exchange for not having her curse removed and keeping some of Rosella's jewels.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • The Trope Namer and Trope Codifier is Aesop's fable The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, numbered 87 in the Perry Index. A farmer has a goose that lays golden eggs but becomes greedy, deciding to slaughter it. But when he cuts the goose open, there are no more eggs.
  • In the mythology of Hawaii, the princess Hainuwele was always retreating to a private place and coming back with jewelry, dishes, and other precious items. Some greedy people killed her to raid her private stash. They discovered only a privy, as she had been defecating the valuables.
  • One Hindu folktale has a variant of this: when a Brahman dies and leaves his family destitute, he is reincarnated as a bird with golden feathers. To ensure that his family won't rely on charity, he comes every day and gives his wife a golden feather. The wife starts enjoying a life of luxury and becomes greedy; she snatches the bird and plucks all the feathers against her children's protests. They promptly turn into white, ordinary feathers. He reveals that the reason why he gave one feather at a time was that more than one would end the enchantment. When his feathers do grow back, they are white and he feels he no longer has a place. So he flies off, and she eventually runs out of money.

Video Games

Western Animation

  • Golden Yeggs (Warner Bros, 1950) is another film adaptation of the original story.
  • Adventures from the Book of Virtues adapted this story. A farmer and his wife fall on hard times, being so desperate they prepare to slaughter their only goose. The goose starts laying golden eggs, saving her life for a few months. The wife then comes to a logical conclusion: all birds stop laying eventually, so it's better to cut open the goose and get all the eggs. Turns out when she does kill the goose, it has no golden eggs.

Real Life

  • Verizon's castration of tumblr in 2018: a ham-handed and tone-deaf effort to "sanitize" what was then the Net's largest microblogging site in order to attract more advertising revenue and monetize its communities for fandoms and social movements. It resulted instead in users abandoning the site by the millions and its valuation plunging from over a billion US dollars to just a few million in a matter of weeks. Verizon was ultimately forced to sell the site only eight months later at a fraction of a penny on the dollar compared to what it paid to acquire it.
  • Narrowly averted by OnlyFans, which started going down the same road as tumblr in 2021 but apparently was able to learn from tumblr's example -- within two weeks of announcing its intent to restrict "adult" content OnlyFans abruptly reversed course, stopping a similar user base flight which had begun with the initial announcement.
  • This is the basic modus operandi of the classic corporate raider, who does it to other people's Golden Geese for their personal benefit: Find a company that is marginal, making a small but reliable profit, buy it, then dismember it and sell off its pieces and assets for an immediate profit, killing the company in the process. Frequently justified with the claim that if the company didn't have the money to defend itself from a hostile takeover, it didn't deserve to keep operating.
  • As many commentators (including Frank Zappa in the page quote) have noted over the past few decades, the tunnel-vision focus Wall Street has on next-quarter profits over any other benefit or metric has proven to be to the detriment of any public company that attempts strategic long-term planning. Companies that were trying to be the next IBM or Sears with a century-plus lifespan have been driven out of business either by sacrificing less-profitable but necessary divisions to satisfy their investors' demands for immediate dividends and higher share prices, or by having their stock prices tanked when they insist on planning and investing for the long term in defiance of their shareholders -- assuming the shareholders don't vote the forward-thinking officers out and replace them with someone more amenable to fast cash at the cost of everything else.

The underlying problem, as usual, is Wall Street’s unyielding, often myopic desire for improved quarterly returns at any cost. It’s not enough to provide a high quality, profitable service that people like. The need for improved quarterly returns ultimately results in companies cannibalizing their own products and brands in order to appease this need for relentless growth. Even if it harms longer term company health.

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