Is it ringing?

Yesterday saw in BBC that in Spain unemployment rates have zoomed to 18%. Thats almost a fifth of the working population. Now while one may blame it on the recession but i believe there is something more deeprooted that is to blame and which irks me more because the recession may have an end to it...but the other problem, now thats something

Imagine for a moment the whole of the world is split into five different countries each having a hundred people. Now one country comes up with an invention called cellphone. First in country A 2 people buy it then a few people in country B buy it, country C,D and E are relatively poor so right now they can't afford it.

So the demand for this thing called cellphone rises in country A and B. Then they realize that they can improve profits by getting the manufacturing done in country C.So they outsource to country C. The income levels in country C start rising so people there also start being able to afford cellphones. Meanwhile in country A and B almost everybody has a cellphone so you start introducing more features, some people buy more than one handset, some others change it every now and then and dump the old one so that every year a manager can say he has sold more mobiles than the previous year.

Slowly sales in country A and B start to plateau when you realize that Country C only 6 people have bought cell phones while they have gotten rich making cellphones for A and B. So you start focussing on country C and you see tremendous growth next few years. Then sometime down you realize that sales from C will not be enough and you start looking at D and E, by now the world population is 600 so you have more people to sell to.

But where does this go to? till when can you work on a growing sales model? till when can you tell people to buy more and more, till when can we exploit the earth more and more for our luxuries than our needs, till when can the owner of the cellphone co. live in palaces and eat dishes with gold foil while someone in country E is drinking dirty water.

Something tells me that we humans have gone very wrong somewhere...very very wrong