Get ready for the celebrations. Tuesday sees the release of Britain's growth figures for the first three months of 2014 and they will show a hefty rise in national output. An increase of 1% in gross domestic product is possible.

This has political significance given that a year ago there were fears the UK was about to descend into a triple-dip recession and that a year from now the parties will be counting down the days to a May 2015 general election. You can write the headlines now: "Boom-boom Britain"; "Britain back with a bang"; "Never had it so good".

A recovery is happening and there is no immediate sign of a slowdown. For the government, this is helpful, since the economy is a big – though not the only – factor in determining who wins elections.

Whether the recovery is for keeps is a different matter. Those who think it is, see fixing the economy after the crash of 2008 as a technical matter; a bit like a mechanic repairing a car that is basically sound but has been driven recklessly. The Treasury and the Bank of England have stuck their heads under the bonnet, tinkered around a bit with regulation, interest rates, quantitative easing and tax breaks, and the engine is now running as sweet as a nut. Job done.

This is a convenient explanation, because it implies that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the economic model in 2007. It suggests we can forget the talk about rethinking how economics is taught, and brush aside inconvenient distractions such as class, ethics and distribution of the fruits of growth because the iron laws of the market will take care of everything in time.

Economics undergraduates at Manchester University have put up a determined resistance to this orthodox view of the world and recently published a report on what is going wrong with the teaching of economics, complete with a foreword by the Bank of England's Andy Haldane.

The report notes: "Economics education at Manchester has elevated one economic paradigm, often called neo-classical economics, to the sole object of study. Other schools of thought – such as institutional, evolutionary, Austrian, post-Keynesian, Marxist, feminist and ecological economics – are almost completely absent."

Haldane says it is time to recast economics and suggests returning to the book Adam Smith wrote before the Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments. This was the tome in which Smith highlighted the need for co-operation rather than competition, and said ethics and fairness were crucial to a successful economy.

"Smith is being rediscovered in his true colours: as political scientist, sociologist and moral philosopher", Haldane says. "This is evidenced in the upsurge in interest in integrating the insights from other disciplines into economics: history, psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, sociology and neuroscience to name but six."

The lesson to be learned from other disciplines is that economics is messy and complex. It is not neat and tidy and comprehensible with a few pages of elegant algebra.

All of which brings us back to the growth figures. The conventional wisdom is that policy stimulus has worked. Consumers have been love-bombed with enough cheap money to get them back into the shops and the estate agencies. Growth will be sustained this year because falling unemployment will lead to a rise in real wages. Investment will kick in as firms respond to higher consumption.

A period of strong expansion will come to an end once all the spare capacity left after the recession has been used up, and the economy will then settle down to a period when both annual growth and inflation hover around the 2% mark.

A study of any of the six disciplines cited by Haldane would show that this is not the way the world really works. In the short term, growth could easily be higher than the consensus because the behaviour of consumers and firms is affected by what others do and think. Increases in confidence become self-reinforcing. But the mood can change quickly, especially if the model is biologically unsound.

So how healthy is the UK economy? The first thing to note is that the lion's share of the growth since the trough reached in 2009 has been the result of a rising population. Dhaval Joshi, economist with BCA Research, noted recently that gross domestic product had risen by 7% since the recession ended, but the UK's population had grown by 5%. There is, he says, a simple explanation why people feel no better off despite the pick up in gross domestic product: based on GDP per head, they are no better off.

The second thing to note is that the UK has a twin deficit problem. Although the budget deficit has come down from the record peacetime level of 11% of GDP reached after the financial crisis, it is still more than £100bn a year – more than 5% of GDP. The current account deficit – trade plus investment income plus payments to international bodies – is of a similar size.

The last time the UK had a current account deficit of more than 5% of GDP was in the late 1980s, when the Lawson boom was about to collapse. At that point, though, years of strong growth had left the public finances in the black and there was scope to let the public finances take the strain when the economy weakened. If the current surge in activity does prove to be short-lived, it will be no good looking to the Treasury for a fiscal boost. Instead, it will again be up to the Bank of England to keep the economy moving.

The final thing to note is a point raised by Wolfgang Streeck, sociology professor at Cologne University. Streeck's new book, Buying Time, argues that ever since the 1970s, governments in the west have been "buying time" for the existing social and political order. "This they achieved by generating mass allegiance to the neoliberal social project, first through inflation of the money supply, then through an accumulation of public debt and finally through lavish credit to private households."

Seen in this light, more time has now been bought by ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Lower inflation has also provided a short-term boost because it has meant that even squeezed pay packets go a bit further.

The counter to Streeck's argument is that capitalism is endlessly creative and finds way not just of reinventing itself, but also of adapting to cultural and social norms. The US variant, for example, is different from the German variant. But the idea that the British model is structurally weak, currently only regularly delivers for a small elite, and is running out of road is a timely corrective to the self-congratulatory hype likely in the coming days.