For decades, Latin America has been told a simple story: rich countries are rich because they plundered everyone else, and we remain poor because we were plundered. You hear it in classrooms, in political speeches, and in everyday conversation. The trouble is that this story does not hold up against what has actually happened in the world. This article proposes a different explanation, one that is more useful and better supported by the evidence: wealth is not what a country has, but what its society is capable of doing, and developing that capacity is, to a large extent, a decision. To see why, imagine two societies with exactly the same resources: the same territory, the same climate, the same minerals. In the first, people receive a good education, trust the rules, know how to work as a team, and can turn ideas into products. In the second, none of that happens. A few decades later, the first will be far more prosperous than the second, and the difference will not lie in what they o...