Why some countries are doomed to poverty for centuries while others take off in a single generation. Why the answer, when there is one, usually has more to do with religion and institutions than with geography or natural resources.

I have spent a couple of years now with a question that keeps nagging me, and I have finally decided to take it seriously. There will be a book. In the meantime, this post is the first public hint.

The question

When you travel with a camera around your neck through places like Uganda, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Thailand or Indonesia, you end up asking yourself the same question over and over, even if you do not quite formulate it: why does this country live the way it does and the one right next to it live differently? Sometimes the gap is brutal: two neighboring countries, separated only by a border and a few decades of history, diverge wildly in income, health and life expectancy.

The easy explanation is always the one of the day: colonialism, natural resources, geography, the rain. When you start reading seriously, you find that none of those explanations quite fits. There are countries without resources that are rich (Switzerland, Singapore, Israel, Mauritius). There are countries flush with resources that are poor (Venezuela, Nigeria, Congo). There are neighbors who started out the same and diverged with no geographic explanation (the two Koreas, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Poland and Belarus).

Late last year I fell into a reading rabbit hole. I started with Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson, who won the Nobel in Economics in 2024 for it. From there I jumped to David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. And from there, almost by accident, to an author who reshaped my mental frame: Joseph Henrich, the Harvard anthropologist who in The WEIRDest People in the World (2020) argues that the Western psychology underlying modern capitalism was not born from Luther but from the medieval Catholic Church, when it banned marriage between cousins in the sixth century and dismantled the intensive kinship ties that had dominated all of Europe.

From there I could not stop. Timur Kuran explaining why the Islamic world was the richest on the planet for eight centuries and then froze. Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein showing that the economic advantage of Jews did not come from persecution, but from a rabbinical decision in the year 70 CE. Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann demonstrating with Prussian data that the Protestant advantage Weber attributed to a ‘work ethic’ was in fact an advantage of literacy (people learning to read the Bible were, without knowing it, learning to read anything).

And so on.

What I found

What I found is that there is a fascinating academic debate about the relationship between religion, institutions and economic development, and that this debate barely reaches the Spanish-speaking reader. What reaches the reader is either religious apologetics or anticlerical attacks. But the actual debate — that of the economists at Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Northwestern, Bocconi — is far more nuanced and far more interesting.

The hypothesis I settled on, oversimplified: religion rarely acts in the economy as mysticism. It almost always acts as an institution. When those institutions evolve, modernize or are neutralized, the country prospers regardless of the faith of its citizens. When they petrify — as Lebanon did with its confessional National Pact of 1943, as Spain did with its mayorazgos in the sixteenth century, as the Ottomans did with their waqf law — the country sinks even if it remains believing, secular, plural or homogeneous.

It is not a new idea. It is what Acemoglu, Henrich, Kuran and company have been saying for years. What would be new, if anything, is telling it well to someone reading in Spanish who wants neither a boring lecture nor a pamphlet.

The book

I have started drafting a popular book on the subject. Dios y el Dinero. How religions shaped the wealth of nations, from Weber to today. Eighteen chapters, in five parts: the question and the grandfathers of the debate; the five great religious families as a test bed; a comparative chapter on multireligious city-states (Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong and Lebanon); the frontier of the debate (Henrich, Acemoglu, McCloskey); and the Hispanic angle, which English-language literature barely touches: Spain, Latin America, the Inquisition, the prosperity gospel.

There is a long stretch left. But it has begun, and I do not want to wait until it is finished to talk about it.

The Substack

So I do not lock myself in front of the computer for a year or two until the book is out, I have opened a weekly Substack: Dios y el Dinero. Every Monday at 8 in the morning a new entry goes up. It is the public notebook while I write the book: a country, a piece of data, an academic thesis, every Monday.

The newsletter is in Spanish, but the cases and the arguments may interest any reader curious about the intersection of religion and development. The first entry, Four cities, four destinies, compares Singapore, Mauritius, Hong Kong and Lebanon — four small territories with diverse religious composition that started from similar conditions and diverged wildly. Three succeeded; one collapsed. The difference was not religious diversity. It was the institution built on top of it.

Coming next: why the ‘Hindu rate of growth’ was not Hindu, what Weber got right and what he did not, how Erdoğan surrendered to economics in 2023, why Catholic Philippines is poorer than Communist Vietnam, and why Israel contains the most extreme natural experiment in the book.

If the topic interests you, or you just want to watch the project evolve, subscribe for free here: diosyeldinero.substack.com. (The content is in Spanish; an English version may follow if there is demand.)

Why I am telling this

Because starting a book in silence for two years and then surprising the world with it is the classic recipe for failing as an author in 2026. People want to see the process now. And for me, writing in public forces me to think better: if I am going to publish every Monday something that will stand the gaze of a real reader, I cannot afford to leave ideas half-finished.

So here we are. If photography or volunteering or IT is your thing and you have stumbled onto this post by accident: do not worry, this is still my personal blog. It just happens that I now also write about religion and economics. The things one does when one gets bored of always doing the same.

To follow along:

• 🌐 Substack: diosyeldinero.substack.com — new entry every Monday
• 🐦 X / Twitter: @preca72 — comments, readings, loose data
• 📚 Book: I will announce it here when it is out

Until next time.