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How can we explain global differences in economic prosperity? While this is perhaps the oldest question in economics, a great deal of progress has been made in the last two decades as new data sources and fresh insights have accumulated. Researchers have argued for the importance of factors related to climate and geography, disease, political institutions, colonialism, human capital, and culture. In this paper, we aim to contribute to mapping this causal web by examining whether the tightness and breadth of family organizations–what we'll call kinship intensity–can contribute to explaining differences in economic prosperity around the globe. Combining pixel- and population-level data on satellite luminosity (a proxy for economic development), regional GDP, marriage practices and kin-based institutions, biogeographic variables, and genotypic data (from which we estimate inbreeding levels), we establish a tight empirical link between kinship intensity on the one hand and economic development at the other. Our results hold across countries, within countries at both the regional and population (ethnicity) levels, and within countries in regression-discontinuity design specifications (RDD). For this IGSS conference, we will report a subset of these results that involve genotypic data.