According to the first amendment, government may neither encourage nor discourage the practice of religion generally, nor may it give preference to one religion over another.

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.