Adam smith wrote: "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own:

Mankiw attributes – chapter 1 and his 10 principles – differences in living standards within a countryover time and across countries at a moment in time to: a. the presence or absence of inflation and unemployment. b. the allocation of resources between private markets and the public sector. c. those that have dealt successfully with the efficiency v. equality tradeoff and those that haven’t. d. differences in productivity. e. ones that think at the margin and respond to incentives and those that don’t.