IF independence is on the agenda again, following Brexit, so must be the purpose of independence. There’s little point in setting up a new country for the sake of it; you have to have some idea of what this “better nation” is going to look like.

All three expert contributors to this admirably short book, packing a wealth of ideas into 126 pages, agree that the prospectus for independence in 2014 lacked substance. However, they don’t dwell on the usual suspects: the currency, the monarchy and Nato; and they all believe higher taxation is inevitable and necessary.

The STUC’s Stephen Boyd says you can’t have Nordic public services and investment without Nordic levels of taxation. He’s scathing about the Yes campaign’s refusal to face up to this reality and indulging in “the fantasy that the (2013) White Paper’s proposals could be delivered on current levels of tax”. Boyd ridicules the proposal from Common Weal and others that higher tax revenues could be delivered by better quality jobs, and echoes the inequality campaigner Tony Atkinson’s call for a top rate of 65 per cent.

The First Minister would no doubt respond that this level of taxation would deliver little in the way of actual tax revenues, because so many would avoid paying it, or depart Scotland for our low-tax neighbour. Scotland’s problem is that we don’t have many high earners to tax. George Kerevan, the SNP MP and former Scotsman and now National columnist, points out that there are only 14,000 people earning £150,000 a year, the supertax rate.

Kerevan wants to raise taxes on wealth rather than income. He controversially advocates increasing corporation tax, the reduction of which was the former SNP leader Alex Salmond’s key economic platform. Ireland built its economic recovery on low corporate taxation attracting the Googles and Amazons. Kerevan says this no longer works as a quick way of boosting economic competitiveness. Anyway, Theresa May is now threatening her own regime of low business taxes against the EU if they deny Britain privileged access to the single market.

Kerevan’s ideas are premised on the broader Marxist observation that capitalism has generated a superfluity of capital across the globe. Companies like Apple are sitting on hundreds of billions they cannot invest. Wealth taxes are a way of recycling this. He is clearly correct, but the obvious difficulty here is that very few big global companies are located in little Scotland and therefore available to tax.

Kerevan also proposes increases in capital gains tax, including owner-occupied housing, and surprisingly he also advocates protectionism in an independent Scotland. It will be a brave government that goes down these roads. Nevertheless, Kerevan’s arguments are worth taking seriously. He also calls for inheritance taxes, wage boards to boost incomes, and job creation to replace the one million Scottish jobs he says could be at risk of automation.

Kerevan says an independent Scotland should be a “laboratory” for testing new ideas and Katherine Trebeck has no shortage of them. She endorses shifting the tax burden to “capital, wealth and harmful activities”, but she also calls for a “sharing economy” in which human relationships are seen as part of the economic equation. The creator of Oxfam’’s Humankind Index of wellbeing, Trebeck believes that the relentless pursuit of Gross Domestic Product is a large part of the problem. Her solution involves a combination of cooperatives, social enterprises, local ownership and job sharing.

Trebeck calls for a decoupling of “aspiration from consumption”, which essentially means all of us making do with less stuff. Life should be about “experiences rather than the acquisition of things”. This sounds utopian, but it is perhaps how our society is evolving anyway. Tech billionaires now wear jeans and T-shirts and compete with others in how much of their wealth they can give away. However, they are still billionaires, even though they dress down, and they take billionaire’s decisions, as we have seen with Facebook’s data mining of our private lives.

Also, while the developed world as a whole consumes too much, there’s a lot of people here in Scotland who still don’t have enough stuff and deserve a lot more of it. Hundreds of thousands of working people are dependent on state hand-outs to meet basic civilised needs.

Such is the rapid advance of automation and robotics that what is called “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” may be possible in future. But until politics and social relations are changed, the huge increases in our productive capacities are likely to lead, not to over-consumption, but mass unemployment and destitution. Hopefully, Scotland can help find a better way.

Tackling Timorous Economics – How Scotland’s economy could work better for us all by Katherine Trebeck, George Kerevan and Stephen Boyd Luath, £9.99