Happy New Year to all! And to commemorate the new year, I find this interesting paper that is surprisingly very appropriate to yours truly. You see, one of my new year's resolution to my family is to become more patient. In many occassions, I find myself busy with many things at the same time that I regrettably easily lose my temper to a family member. To help me keep my resolution for the new year, discovering this excellent paper is a way for a good start.
The Chinese proverb "Patience is a virtue" is one of those ageless quotes that seems to ring true every now and then. Experimental economics has brought it even further.
In their latest paper for the Institute for the Study of Labor, Matthias Sutter, Martin Kocher, Daniela Rützler, and Stefan Trautmann studied 661 children and adolescents in an experiment and found that there's a link between impatience on the one hand and health and savings decisions on the other:
"More impatient children and adolescents are more likely to spend money on alcohol and cigarettes, have a higher body mass index (BMI) and are less likely to save money."
I knew there is a wisdom behind this old Chinese proverb. So it seems it's not just that impatience causes stress which eventually is detrimental to your health (then again maybe it is stress that causes one to resort to alcohol and cigarettes).
The same way we can think of other old proverbs, modern economics can give us tools to check which old quotes are applicable and which ones are not. Sutter and the others have given proof of how true this one Chinese proverb is.
Now, what do old quotations say about the cause of impatience? That can help me too.