Reply #57: As one who DID start her own business, let me give you a reality check:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

You need a few things to start a business:

1) A product or service that people are willing to pay for (In my case, Japanese>English translation)

2) The necessary skills/background to make that product or provide that service at a competent level (years and years of graduate work plus residence in Japan, none of which came free)

3) Startup money to buy, at minimum, equipment and to live on while your business is acquiring customers. If you need to have a location other than your home or hire employees, then you need even more startup money. (I worked a second job during my last year of teaching and kept at it while my translation business was getting established. My startup expenses included about $3000 worth of office equipment--computers were more expensive back then--and several hundred dollars worth of reference books, plus monthly living expenses for nearly a year. With no employees and a home office, I got off easy, but it was still a considerable initial outlay.) Banks do not look kindly on would-be business owners with no experience, so my startup was self-financed.

4) The ability to manage your own time and money. I still struggle with this.

5) Customers who are willing to buy your product or service at a price for which you can afford to provide it. (Most of my customers are in Japan. If I had to depend entirely on American customers, I'd starve.)

6) The ability to tolerate an irregular income. (Highest monthly income ever: $9000. Lowest monthly income ever: $200. Those are the extreme outliers, but that's how much it can fluctuate. Not everyone can tolerate that. I barely can.)

7) Having to provide your own health care, retirement, and vacations. Most years, I don't take a vacation, and most of the ones I do take are in conjunctions with business travel and therefore partly tax-deductible. My trip to England last summer was my first "pure" vacation in 13 years.


So even though right-wing economists like George Gilder said in the 1980s that all those laid-off factory workers should just start businesses, he didn't know what he was talking about. Was he envisioning a free-for-all Third World economy in which slum dwellers make pennies a day selling things to one another? I wouldn't be surprised.

I represent the GOOD type of globalization: providing a service that is scarce in Japan (translation by native speakers of English) and, thanks to the time difference, providing it overnight, if necessary. However, when widgets could be manufactured just as well by workers in Chicago as by workers in Chengdu, and the company moves overseas anyway, that's the BAD type of globalization.