If it takes government stimulus money to boost the nation's GDP, which, we've been told, marks the end of the Great Recession, then we may have truly entered a new epoch.

One in which declining personal income, falling consumer spending (according to Commerce Department figures announced Friday) and double-digit unemployment make up the new normal. So long as the government remains both the lender and spender of last resort.

These thoughts occur to me in the wake of Chronicle get-togethers over the past month with academics, labor experts, corporate and nonprofit executives and public policy mavens to discuss the current reality and future prospects of employment in the Bay Area and California. Depressing? Intensely anxiety-inducing would be more accurate.

"Catastrophic" was a word commonly used by the experts to describe California's employment picture, excepting perhaps the comparative bubble that has yet to burst in the inner Bay Area. It will take years, maybe a decade or more, went the consensus, for California to get back to where it was. Or maybe never.

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"We're putting so much money into training and retraining for jobs that simply don't exist anymore," said Shufina English, program director at the California Association for Microenterprise Opportunity. Her recommendation: self-employment, be your own entrepreneur. "It's the wave of the labor future," she said.

That might be dismissed as an exaggerated view, except for another recent data point, one normally regarded as positive: U.S. productivity grew by 6.6 percent in the second quarter. And many of us who are doing much more with far fewer people around us know why.

Or, as Krishna Guha put it in the Financial Times, "efficiency gains can provide an alternative to hiring." Which, in turn, he added, has enabled companies "to defend profits in spite of weak revenues (which) has supported the rebound in the stock market." This, plus the growing use of labor-saving technology, has made for "an unusually high proportion of so-called 'permanent' layoffs."

In last week's employment roundtable at The Chronicle, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce CEO Steve Falk noted the difficulties the city's federally funded Jobs Now program has had in getting employer buy-in, even though the program reimburses 100 percent of the wages paid to a Jobs Now participant. "We can't get employers to participate because they don't want to be seen raising the 'we're hiring' flag," Falk said.

All part of the new normal?

The i still has it: Lot of talk last week about the latest "iPhone killer." That would be the newly introduced Droid, a co-production of Google, Verizon and Motorola. Despite the impressive pedigree, it's like calling Pepsi the "Coke killer." And I'd wager it has little more chance than the previously hyped contender, RC Cola. Sorry, Palm Inc.'s Pre.

Not that there isn't room for the Droid and other competitors. Let a hundred smart phones bloom; let a hundred schools of technology contend. But Apple has established an unassailable brand in the market, which, by the way, now extends to China, where iPhones went on sale Friday.

Of course, world domination can always be undermined. In China, the gray market is already busy undercutting by half the officially priced $1,000 32GB 3GS. The iPhone is far from a roaring success in India, and Apple's exclusive U.S. deal with AT&T does have its limitations.

Both Apple and Verizon, with its superior network, are quite well aware of this last point, and it won't be surprising if the two come together as early as next year. If I were in the betting business, I'd be going long on the iPhone's prospects against all manner of would-be killers.

Freaky Wednesday: Here's a double feature you might want to book in advance: the world's fourth richest man on the same bill as co-authors of just-published "SuperFreakonomics" (sequel to the phenomenon "Freakonomics").

In what promises to be "an electric evening" at the Commonwealth Club on Wednesday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will be "sharing his passion for innovation" (and maybe yachting).

He'll be followed by economist Steven Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner, whose freakonomics solution to global warming, involving helium balloons and a garden hose, has set the likes of Paul Krugman's hair on fire.

Details of Wednesday's event available at www.commonwealthclub.org.