“If there is a Yes vote then this nation of five million people would be able to stand on its own two feet. But the more instructive question is: will it prosper?”
It was Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, co-founder of the London School of Economics, who once remarked that “if all the world’s economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion”.
As we are still recovering from the global banking crisis, the stock of economists who failed to look for it coming should be as low as the bankers who made it happen.
But in Scotland at least, the economists are still king, providing the Yes and No sides with ammunition for the last three years of campaigning.
But in truth, regardless of their PhDs or Nobel prizes, they can’t predict the result from any post-Yes negotiations. It is a point that goes to the heart of who to trust on the economy.
On currency, we have two sides saying opposite things and in truth we will only know what will happen once the cards are played in negotiations.
Again on oil, the predictions on its future have a track record of being wrong, in both directions, so only time will tell.
Linked to oil and currency is the issue of how much money an independent Scotland would be able to raise and spend.
Despite the extreme views of some in Better Together, Scotland is no basket case. If there is a Yes vote then this nation of five million people would be able to stand on its own two feet.
But the more instructive question is: will it prosper?
The Yes campaign has made a passionate case for why it would, but much of this is hinged on the best-case scenario in so many regards, from buoyant oil revenues to reversing the decline in working-age Scots.
Take off the tartan-tinted glasses and the case for a Yes vote is less convincing.
The future economic prosperity they promise will come with a Yes vote could materialise, but the evidence presented to support this is mixed and so much, at least in the first decade, would hinge on what is negotiated in any post-Yes talks.
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