NET RESULTS: Enterprise Ireland's annual state-of-the-working-nation report, released last week, was as icy as the weekend weather that followed.

Unemployment, once below 4 per cent, has inched up to 4.8 per cent and is expected to surpass 5 per cent this year.

The actual body count was even more sobering: 23,556 jobs lost, with a surprising 16,338 of those in indigenous industry. Balanced against 12,300 jobs created, that makes for a net loss of 4,000 home-grown jobs.

Those figures immediately recalled to mind the moaning from certain quarters, back when the downturn really began to bite, about how the nation and economy were far too dependent on multinationals, especially multinational technology companies.

One union leader insisted at the time of the Gateway closure that the State should turn away from technology and multinational companies and instead embrace other Irish-born industries. Asked on Morning Ireland what those industries might be, he suggested textiles and farming. An incredulous Áine Lawlor asked: "Are you suggesting that we should abandon a 21st century industry and go back to two 19th century industries?"

Now here we are in the midst - or if we're fortunate, nearing the end - of the most severe global economic plunge in most people's memories, and it turns out that the homespun industries are the source of job losses, not the multinationals.

However, many indigenous company job losses came from the Irish technology sector, and mostly in the electronics and manufacturing segments.

Such job losses and company closures came directly as a result of troubles in tech, and from a decline in demand within the Irish market itself, often from the multinationals which would have used Irish companies as suppliers.

But the lay-off figures from the technology multinationals tell a complex story. Figures produced by Davy Stockbrokers last spring showed the Republic suffered far less in percentage terms in job losses than the rest of the global operations of the multinationals. I doubt that has changed in intervening months.

So the multinationals offered a safer haven than many expected. But as many industry watchers have noted, the technology multinationals rarely offer an opportunity for spinning off energetic young start-up companies.

And few of the multinationals offer knowledge-intensive jobs in research and development. Those jobs tend to arise out of the indigenous companies, software companies in particular.

That suggests we should carefully handle these employment and unemployment figures and trends and treat them as the complicated, multi-sided puzzle pieces they are. There's a balance in there somewhere between multinationals and indigenous industry. Undoubtedly, we still give greater weight to the value of multinational investment, and still don't provide enough motivation for the formation of sharp Irish companies.

That said, our picture looks pretty darn good compared to the way the puzzle pieces are - or aren't - fitting together in Silicon Valley. The Valley, once the most robust job market in the States with less than 2 per cent out of work, now staggers under 7 per cent unemployment, higher in the more tech-centric counties.

The region has lost 87,000 jobs, and some 40,000 people have left the area entirely, giving up on the one-time technology industry dream of wealth and early retirement, according to an article this week in the New York Times.

One might guess that an upside to the crisis is a drop by 25 per cent in the average price of a home in the Bay Area. The only problem is that the median price of a home in the greater Silicon Valley area is now an extraordinary $540,000 (€518,035), affordable for only 18 per cent of the population.

That makes the Irish median price, at somewhere over the €200,000 mark, seem a right bargain.

Housing prices are a very good point of comparison if one wants to probe a little deeper into some crucial similarities and differences in the two economies. Listen to what Mr Edward Leamer, director of the AndersonForecast at the University of California at Los Angeles, told the New York Times: "The Bay Area is waiting patiently for that tech bounce-back that may never come. It has priced itself out of virtually any other economic function."

If he is right, those are grim words. And they are grim, too, if you compare our situation in the Republic: high inflation, expensive housing, upward-spiralling cost of living, rising salary costs. Have we, in embracing a high-paying, youthful industry like technology, priced ourselves out of most other economic functions?

I think that is too stark an analysis - yet. But we have rushed, dizzily, straight into the arms of a hyper-speed industry and gloried in the economic benefits it has brought. The technology industry pays its young workers well, who then go out and spend (who cares about the cost of a cappuccino or pint?).

They want to sink some of their salary into a home; and they tend to want to live in cities (up goes demand for and prices of city centre homes and apartments). New bars, new restaurants, new housing, all priced beyond what any of us could have imagined five years ago.

We've given very little thought to the social dimensions and the social consequences of our dalliance with high-income industries.

Unfortunately, the one national body whose job it was to consider just those things, the Information Society Commission, disappeared during precisely the years when it has been needed most, due to the delay by the Taoiseach's Department in appointing someone to head the thing.

Effectively absent since 2000, the commission is now back, and full of good intentions - but honestly, has anyone noticed?

The idea of an information society now seems almost quaint. If it is - if no one cares about prices, or inflation, or quality of living, or spreading economic benefits - then we have already forgotten to be caretakers of our own economic and social well-being. And we'll be well on our way to pricing ourselves out of a diverse economy, with potentially dire consequences down the line.

klillington@irish-times.ie

Karlin's weblog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/