The London Times consolidates a range of stories from the past couple of days to declare that the housing market has turned. One swallow does not make a summer, but it seems reasonable to see this as an inflection point. The top was called about April by the FT, after bearish commentators like fund manager Tony Dye and economist Roger Bootle had come out of the woodwork. This has fed through into sentiment and the data. The crowning moment was clearly Mervyn King’s comment in the spring, and the fundamental effect of rising interest rates.

Taking into consideration the pensions crisis and high levels of personal borrowing, other things being equal, it is not difficult to imagine a fairly bleak economic future with persistently low house prices and lower levels of personal consumption, despite efforts by the Bank of England to show these are not directly linked. Of course necessity is the mother of invention, so harder times might generate the inventive spark that will produce the new economic growth to get us out of any long-term hole and into a healthy and happy retirement. But looking from today, society may not be very well equipped for such a venture. In particular, the falling level of numeracy (the number of people enrolling to become maths teachers apparently fell off a cliff in 2001) does not bode well for our economic future. Maths maths teaching is a subject I will return to time and again.

How would this be reversed? In the early 18th century British economic growth was constrained because charcoal was the only useful source of fuel to make good quality iron. The supply of wood for burning had natural limits. Abraham Darby left Bristol in the early 18th century for Coalbrookdale, experimented with coke to produce cheap iron to make pots, and the industrial revolution was born. The rest, as they say, is history.

Whether any of the technological advances of the past few years are as profound as we feel they are, and as profound as Darby’s, only time will tell. It could be that the sequential financial crises of the past few years that seem to be culminating in a global housing bubble are just a hiccup, although possibly severe, in a much deeper economic and social change than even the technophiles and dotcommers appreciate.

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