Part of this is that when Lisps started ALL other languages were very low level and the hardware that the Lisps were running on did not afford to waste any memo

Part of this is that when Lisps started ALL other languages were very low level and the hardware that the Lisps were running on did not afford to waste any memory or cycles. So efficiency was an important consideration right from the start. Other languages that most people use today grew at later times (borrowing from Lisp) when the resources wasn't such a big deal. I consider languages like PHP, Ruby and Python peak examples of mainstream languages that were created with barely any consideration for efficiency. This coincides with 1990s and early 2000s where we saw dramatic increase of system resources and especially memory without much need to use it efficiently. Nowadays it improved a little bit as we learn to run bigger loads so newer mainstream languages (like Rust) and some older (like Java, C# or JavaScript) are putting more effort on efficiency.