Rich? Broke? Blame it on your genes!

A more modern explanation is that 30% of what we amount to is ruled by our genes and 70% by behavior acquired as we travel through life.

But now there’s a new scientific theory linking genetics to what makes someone a “saver” or a “spender”. In other words, the financial profligacy or otherwise of a person is in the blood – and according to the authors of the study, there ain’t nothing anyone can do about it!

This is the gist of the thesis, «The Origins of Savings Behavior», by US university professors Stephan Siegel from Washington, and Herbert Cronqvist, from Claremont McKenna. The study is publicly available on the Internet.

Although the duo don’t exactly explain why, they studied the savings behavior of 15.000 sets of Swedish twins (don’t twins exist in other countries?): identical, fraternal and those that had been raised apart.

To their great surprise the professors discovered that identical twins share the same “spend/ save” patterns – even when raised apart.

The team admit that nurture and socialisation play a large part in the process but that after the age of 40 men and women tend to forget everything they’ve been taught by parents/ teachers over finances and act on guided impulses from their genetically-programmed predisposition: to either spend, or save.

The study merited the recent attention of «Time» magazine, in which readers strongly contested the veracity of conclusions reached by Siegel and Cronqvist – who both maintain that political decision makers should be aware of potential voters’ financial behavior.

But why shouldn’t it be the other way round?

Wouldn’t it be better if individuals, or better still, taxpayers and electors, knew the genetic predisposition towards money of a determined politician? Whether or not he was likely to save or squander public funds?

And as there seems to be no cure for this kind of genetic behavior, wouldn’t it be better if politicians with spendthrift genes were gently steered towards other jobs? Finding Swedish twins for studious Americans, for example…