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The proverb “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” advises to stick with what you have instead of pursuing something uncertain. It originated in Latin and warns against greed. The concept can be applied to various life situations, including gambling. Game theory analysis can help determine the relative values of the bird in hand and the bird in the bush. Some people argue that the unknown might be more valuable than the known.
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” also sometimes given as “One bird in the hand is better than two in the bush,” is a proverb that says it is better to stick with something you already have, than to pursue something you might never get. This proverb is a very popular warning that is widely used in many English-speaking countries.
The phrase appears to have originated sometime in the 13th century, in a related Latin form: Plus valet in manibus avis unica quam dupla silvis. This can loosely be translated as “A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the woods”.
The basic caveat of this saying is that one must be careful not to get too greedy in life. If you hold a bird in your hand, you eat your meal for the evening. You can take that bird and be well fed. If instead you let it go to chase two birds you spied in a bush, you might catch none and end up starving for the night. This proverb indicates that by giving up a sure thing for a more promising possibility, one also runs the risk of losing both the sure thing and the promising possibility.
The saying can be used to refer to any number of things, in many different life situations. Since the basic concept is to stay away from greed, it is often very appropriate. In gambling, for example, a person who has won a fair amount of money and wants to gamble it all away again may remember that he has already made a profit, and by pursuing even more money, he may lose it all.
The concept demonstrated by the proverb can be examined more closely using a game theory analysis. In this, we should also look into the likelihood of catching the two birds in the bush. Then we could start calculating better the relative values of the bird in the hand and the bird in the bush. Different strategies would then manifest themselves: an extremely cautious strategy would of course always keep the known quantity, even if the probability of catching the two birds in the bush was 99%; a balanced strategy might advocate keeping a bird as long as the chance of catching birds in the bush is less than 50%; and an extremely bullish strategy would always go for two birds in the bush.
Some people also respond to this proverb by not necessarily accepting the wisdom that one bird in the hand is in fact better than two in the bush. Respondents usually point out that while something that is known and possessed might be certain, the unknown might be of far greater value than the known. An answer might be something like “a bird in the hand is good, but a bird in the bush might sing.”
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