The National Governors Conference’s summer meeting was much the same as its winter one. The central message was unchanged. States must compete, economically, not only against each other but against the world. The global economy, once the promise of all good things, has come home to roost and America is coming up short, big time, in all that is necessary to stay on top of the game.

The guest speaker was, again, an international corporation’s CEO chosen to provide bona fides to a game plan every state must adopt, and quickly. Businesses need a new highly skilled work force and will go wherever that is provided. Fail to provide that at your own peril.

The branding of the conference was “America Works,” though the truth conveyed was that it is working very poorly when it works at all in providing jobs of the future or even today. Our national reality, which the conference didn’t address, is that we are working harder than ever and and being compensated less and less in real spending power. The majority of our still great wealth is in the pockets of those at the top, those who own the very multi-national corporations that want those at the middle and bottom to finance an educational infrastructure vital to corporate survival. If we provide that infrastructure, along with those of cheap energy and transportation, they will allow us to continue working for them. Oh yes, and tax breaks. If we don’t, then hasta la vista. If you want to hear that in English, press 1 now.

The CEO wasn’t at all threatening in his remarks, which simply advised: “This is how it is.” He spoke of how to best “attack” a problem all now share in a “battle for talent.” He addressed our governors as “fellow CEOs.” This was all about prosperity based on productivity, one of the most “important problems facing America in the next 15 years.”

In the battle for talent there are the three Ps: Population, Participation and Productivity.

New births aren’t booming, and retiring baby boomers are not being replaced in the workplace, causing many states to have an increasingly insufficient work force from which to cull necessary talent. No mention of those deepsixed because they are cost-ineffective older workers. That’s the first P.

Not enough people who can work do. This lack of workplace participation is highest among those ages 16-24. That’s P number two. No mention as to what the turnoff to gainful employment might be.

Our productivity growth is below 1 percent. This disappointing third P is despite all our heavy investment in technological advances.

Contrary to popular perception, government reports on the subject find that computer enhanced workplaces haven’t provided any real evidence of increased profitability. IT firms are going great guns while everyone else hasn’t discovered how to turn Candy Crush or Texas HoldEm into enhancing the bottom line. Even legit e-work hasn’t demonstrated its professed indispensability. Group think just keeps burying its head deeper into the sand of a self perpetuating myth that e-technology holds all the cards. Whenever I need timely business contact, comparing apples clearly to apples, I always go to phone communication if I want a turnaround in the same day. Computer searches and correspondences are such a compulsive black hole of ill spent time and tech frustration.

Where computer assisted workplace employment actually increases productivity is where programmed production techniques replace worker employment in part or altogether.

Summation: Our population is shrinking. More and more of those who can join the workforce choose not to. And, those employed, even if e-tech savvy, can’t increase productivity to necessary levels. The good news, for those businesses unencumbered by national boarders, is that there is a world out there where the three Ps are being successfully brought together, developing sought after talent pools of low cost skilled manpower. The bad news for us: even if corporations maintain a stateside presence, needed talent will be sourced from elsewhere. What else can a business do? That will take care of P number 1. Taking care of the second P, this necessary immigration, real or virtual, will be stealing what remain of our jobs.

P number 3, if immigrant work ethic is what it has always been, will be taken care of by a good application of survival of the fittest, until the fitness of xenophobic freed robotic labor truly comes into play. “Hello, my name is HAL and I am not at fault for your job loss. I’m just putting my sentient circuitry to the fullest possible use in a disappearing workplace entirely attributable to your human error.” This 2000-something Odyssey is becoming more and more probable every day. The discovery that odyssey will bring, good or bad, is of our own making. Hopefully, it will bring about rediscovery of the virtues of a full employment of our better capitalist angels.

Our greatest technological achievement would be learning how to reset our economic clock backwards to when American capitalism didn’t eat its young or sell off its seed corn.

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Gary Anderson lives in Bath.