TECHNICAL SUPPORT

A mysterious event, that high-tech roundtable held yesterday in Washington, D.C.

Eight chief executives of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Intel gathered to look at the future of U.S. technology, but neither The New York Times nor The Wall Street Journal bothered to show up. The media that did attend had different ideas on what they were seeing:

The executives “urged Congress and the Bush administration not to impose trade restrictions aimed at keeping U.S. jobs from moving overseas, where labor costs are lower,” The Associated Press said.

Or they “warned Wednesday that the U.S. is losing ground to foreign nations in areas of innovation and education. If not fixed, they said, it will hurt America’s competitiveness,” Investors Business Daily said.

Or the executives, “facing criticism for moving jobs to low-cost centers such as India and China, said on Wednesday that the United States needs to boost education and offer more tax breaks,” Reuters reported.

The Associated Press seems to be hitting closest to the truth, since neither of the business press reports deal extensively with jobs being sent overseas, where wages are lower, even though the Reuters report explicitly brings it up in its first sentence. Instead, the business press builds cases for how much money other countries are pouring into tech education and research and development, ignoring the fact that the jobs being sent overseas worrying us here in the United States are generally not in the realm of dramatic technological advances.

That is, it’s unclear how much more education or research and development dollars are needed to keep customer service call centers in the United States, let alone people screwing together motherboards.

Instead, the business press parrots CEO gibberish about how “tax credits ... will spur a new wave of U.S. productivity growth” or quotes meaningless tropes from Bruce Mehlman, the leader of this Computer Systems Policy Project, about how “We can either choose to compete with the rising powers of China and India and other would-be economic leaders and take advantage of worldwide business opportunities or we could retreat.”

This would mean more if GandiTech were threatening Hewlett-Packard’s dominance in the printer market or if Mao-Crosoft had a disruptive semiconductor breakthrough on the horizon, but in fact U.S. companies are still enormously competitive in such fields. And among the nations mentioned by Intel CEO Craig Barrett as having a “rich, educational heritage and a large number of well-educated people that can do just about any job,” somehow only one -- Ireland -- is from the Western world. The other nations: India, China, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia.

Fortunately, this will all work its way around to the United States again, although it’s hard to say when. First our multinational companies must rove the entire world, moving plants and employment from nation to nation in search of the cheapest workers and richest incentives. Eventually, because there’s so little work in the United States, we will again be among the most desperate for work, and therefore among the cheapest workers.

Then we can have jobs again.