The recent Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Joel Mokyr, a Dutch-Jewish historian and economist, has reopened an old debate about the origins of prosperity and the misery of nations. Mokyr has demonstrated that economic growth does not arise solely from capital, geography, or institutions, but from something deeper: culture. Culture—that invisible fabric of values, beliefs, and attitudes toward knowledge, work, and innovation—has ultimately been the most decisive variable in human progress. No Industrial Revolution would have been possible without a prior revolution of the mind.
In A Culture of Growth (2017), Mokyr explained that the economic rise of the West since the eighteenth century was not the product of chance or the mechanical accumulation of capital, but of the emergence of a different mentality: one that valued useful knowledge, experimentation, and irreverence toward dogma. When Europeans came to believe they could improve their destiny by manipulating nature and applying reason to work, humanity made a civilizational leap. This transformation of the mind—more than of technique—broke centuries of fatalism. Irreverence toward the immutable was, in Mokyr’s words, the spark that ignited progress. Francis Bacon had already anticipated this intellectual revolution when he stated that the true purpose of science was “to endow human life with new discoveries and resources.”¹ From that moment on, progress ceased to be a sin and became a moral duty.
Other thinkers had reached similar conclusions. David S. Landes pointed out that “if we have learned anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes almost all the difference.”² Max Weber, for his part, identified in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) a transformation in the valuation of effort, punctuality, and responsibility that enabled the rise of modern capitalism. Mokyr took that reflection one step further: he distinguished between the homo economicus, who maximizes resources, and the homo creativus, who rebels against the limits of nature. Without the latter—he argues—we would still be living poor and short lives³. Creativity has produced not only machines, but entirely new ways of seeing the world.
This thesis fully aligns with my doctoral research, The Culture of Success of the Guatemalan: A Key Element to Encourage Development and the Production of National Wealth⁴. In it, I argued that the root of Guatemala’s backwardness is not economic, but cultural. Statistics may measure GDP or investment, but none explains why so many Guatemalans have believed that “it can’t be done,” that other people’s success is suspicious, or that wealth belongs only to others. This vision, which Matteo Marini called “the image of limited good,” generates obedience, resentment, and paralysis⁵. When a society believes that one person’s success implies another person’s failure, it destroys trust and sabotages its own growth.
By contrast, when achievement motivation and responsibility are taught, GDP grows. Marini demonstrated that an increase of only five percentage points in the share of parents who teach responsibility to their children can raise national GDP growth by nearly one percentage point annually⁶. Culture, indeed, produces development. What we believe determines what we do, and what we do defines what we are.
It is no coincidence that the fable of the crabs in the pot is often used to represent Guatemalans. Every time one tries to climb out, the others pull it back down. That metaphor summarizes a cultural pattern that rewards mediocrity and punishes merit. Since the Colonial era, Guatemala has lived in economic and mental isolation: few ports, limited connectivity, weak investment, and above all, a mentality that fears change and distrusts success. Meanwhile, countries that embraced a culture of innovation—such as Ireland, Poland, or South Korea—transformed their productive structures. It was not geography or size that changed their destiny, but their collective mentality.
What condemns us is not a lack of resources, talent, or laws, but a narrative that repeats that wealth is sinful and that other people’s success should be punished rather than imitated. To overcome underdevelopment, we must change that narrative. A culture of success cannot be imposed by decree: it must be taught, modeled, and rewarded. It requires an education system that forms achievement-oriented citizens instead of complainers; media that celebrate creation instead of victimhood; businesses that reward merit instead of surnames; and public policies that reward innovation instead of proximity to political power.
David C. McClelland, in The Achieving Society (1961), demonstrated that societies with high achievement motivation prosper because their individuals impose standards of excellence on themselves and do not wait for external incentives to act⁷. When a critical mass of highly achievement-oriented people emerges within a culture, things—he argued—begin to accelerate. The key, therefore, lies not in politics, but in the values that shape the mind of every citizen.
Guatemala needs its own Enlightenment: a quiet revolution rooted not in politics, but in the mind and in values. We must dare to believe that progress is not alien to us, that we can become prosperous if we believe we can, if we desire it with purpose, and if we act starting today to achieve it. But above all, we must understand that the highest act of solidarity is achieving success in order to change the life of our people. Individual success, when multiplied through responsibility and example, becomes a public virtue.
Mokyr reminded the world that the Enlightenment was not merely an age of inventions, but an awakening of the spirit. It was the victory of curiosity over fear, merit over lineage, and responsibility over resignation. Guatemala needs that same rebirth. Not of machines, but of mentalities. Not of subsidies, but of ideas. To the point that the Norwegians of the Nobel, without guilt or hypocrisy, have prioritized oil exploitation as a source of national wealth, demonstrating that the rational use of natural resources can be compatible with prosperity and civic virtue.
The question this Nobel Prize leaves us with is therefore profoundly moral: will we continue teaching our children that wealth belongs to others, or will we dare to build a culture that sees success as the noblest service to the nation?
References (MRHA Style)
Francis Bacon, Preparative towards a Natural and Experimental History (1620), in Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 66.
David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 516.
Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), vii.
Ramiro Bolaños, The Culture of Success of the Guatemalan: A Key Element to Encourage Development and the Production of National Wealth (Guatemala: Universidad Panamericana, 2022), vi.
Matteo Marini, “Cultural Evolution and Economic Growth: A Theoretical Hypothesis with Some Empirical Evidence,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 33 (2004): 765–784.
Ibid., 780.
David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Manfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2010), 44–45.
