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Patience
The latest Economist magazine has an interesting article, "Economics and anthropology" (Patient capital)
It starts out:
"IN MODERN economies, inequality is a fact of life. But disparities of income are a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the species's existence, humans lived in small foraging bands that had little material surplus and therefore enjoyed a relatively egalitarian existence. The invention of agriculture, which generates a surplus that can be stored and also gives value to land, permitted this to change. But permission is not prescription. Exactly why some people were able to accumulate more than others has been something of an anthropological mystery. The archaeological record is little help, but the main hypotheses have been luck, intelligence and aggression. These all, of course, play their part, but now a fourth phenomenon has been added to the list: patience.
there was a study on a tribe in the Amazon as the tribe westernized and concluded:
...found that those who had shown most patience in the original experiment had also seen their incomes increase more than those of their less patient counterparts. The effect was relatively small—the incomes of the patient had grown 1% a year faster than those of the impatient. Over a lifetime, though, that adds up to a significant amount of inequality. The patient, then, could take their place alongside the lucky, the smart and the violent at the top of society's heap."
So it looks like LBYM folks who can delay gratification have a 'natural' advantage for financial success. Hey, instead of searching around th Amazon The Economist should just have come here for evidence.
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T.S. Eliot:
Old men ought to be explorers
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