MARK Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has never awakened in me the feelings of awe he seems to call forth in other people – especially in those members of the UK Government who have just had his term of office lengthened from five to seven

years, so that he will finish after Brexit in 2020.

Carney’s bland aim has always been stability. I suppose that is all to the good in turbulent times. But as an aim it does not seem to do much more good in tranquil times because change will happen anyway, now with more disruption, now with less. In fact our whole experience in recent decades goes to show that equilibrium, as conceptualised in neo-classical economics, is a pipe-dream.

We had better just get used to its opposite of ceaseless commotion. We may then come to at least temporary terms with the forces, mainly technological, driving the world we live in, before we need to turn and confront fresh challenges. I would say normal human beings can still cope with all this, while governors of central banks cannot, for all the expertise they might call on and the power they might wield.

Let me give two examples of what I mean in the immediate economic context Carney faces. One arises from the results of Brexit, which the boy racers among his forecasting team have been modelling. Their prediction, assuming no deal with Brussels, is for UK house prices to crash by 33% in the three years after April 2019. The governor meant to frighten us with this, but I do not see it as altogether a bad thing.

The absurd inflation of house prices has been a weakness rather than a strength of the economy. It means funds potentially available for more productive investment get diverted into mere gazumping. The sooner it all stops the better, but the more quickly it all stops the more painful it will be. It will be worst by far in those Home Counties that voted Leave, which will serve them right. Luckily, it will be much less of a problem in prudent Scotland, which voted to Remain and in any case never got blown away in the madness of the housing bubble.

My second example also comes from the EU environment in which the UK will need to keep operating, even if not able to shape it in any way, after Brexit. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, has just made an important announcement of his own, that the vast balances of euros created since 2011 in the programme of quantitative easing (otherwise known as printing money) are to be run down and reabsorbed into the ECB by the end of the year.

This exercise had been a slow-motion response to the great debt crisis of a decade ago, intended to stop commercial banks failing. Now that the European economy is expanding again, we can go back to square one – sort of.

Time will tell if my general assessment is correct, but here I want to focus on just one side-effect. The easing went ahead on both sides of the Channel, aided by the fact that London is the main financial centre for the entire EU. What we then had was a bottomless pool of liquidity in Europe. Sometimes borrowing in one currency rather than another offered slightly better terms, but the actual denomination of loans is not nowadays a matter of great importance. The fact was the money would always be there, at least for governments running deficits, for banks rebuilding their balance sheets and for blue-chip companies.

It has not always been there for entrepreneurs struggling to start up a business, though the bankers made sure to get their bonuses. Now things will get tougher for everybody.

It’s a funny thing, this bias in markets towards the tried and trusted, for want of a better plan sustained even into completely novel conditions where nobody is worthy of much trust. In the UK it has meant that over the last 10 years, despite the financial problems, a lot of companies have survived which really ought to have gone under. At the same time, the formation of new companies has been slowed down or has not happened at all, especially of those at the outer cutting edge of the digital economy, often set up by young people with no resources except their brains.

This underlies the big difference between the recession we are just emerging from (in Scotland more slowly than in the rest of the UK) and other recessions we have known or heard tell of or read about in the history books. During the slump of the 1930s the rate of unemployment reached more than 30% in the worst parts of Clydeside, whereas today it is a little over 5%. What happens instead is that people keep their places in the workforce at wages which stay low. The price of a job may be poverty in work.

As a result the productivity of the UK economy, the outputs we get from our inputs, has been falling. Within it the productivity of the Scottish economy has probably been falling faster than the average, though I would not bet my shirt on this because of poor statistics.

The same is seen in much of the western world, amid the variable speed of recovery from the crash of 2008. But on these islands things have been at their worst. Now it takes one British worker to produce in five days what is produced in four days by one American, French or German worker. Unless we boost our performance from the labour, capital and technology we deploy, there is no chance of a sustained rise in our living standards. Trade unions that claim, or governments that give, wage rises without taking heed of productivity are just deluding themselves and the workforce.

IS there anything the Scottish Government can do, different from the austerity and Brexit that are the UK’s feckless solutions? Of course, short of national independence and the full panoply of economic powers, the answer must be little.

Even so, the answer is not nothing. We can start making it clear that, if Scotland is to become a bed of roses, it will only be at the cost of some sore backs and blistered hands. Day one of independence will not usher in an earthly paradise.

Assuming indyref2 is to take place within the foreseeable future, it would surely be useful to have some sign of what economic policies the Scottish Government would adopt if it were free to choose them all.

The boost of the Yes vote from 45% to more than 50% will be due to voters for whom national independence is not so much an emotional cause as a financial calculation.

Unless they can be given some reasonable hope of getting richer in a new Scotland than they would in the old UK, they will vote No.

The report from Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission showed a way forward. It said that for some time ahead, public expenditure should grow more slowly than gross domestic product.

That would open up scope for revival of the private sector, from which in the end all growth must come. It would be good for the First Minister to start fleshing out some ideas about how to do it. She should not shun controversy if it helps to prepare the nation better for the future she seeks. She has to be Sturgeon. She can’t be Carney.