Bloomberg News reporters Anna-Louise Jackson and Anthony Feld write that at least a million formerly self-employed Americans, aggregate, have lost their businesses since the start of the recession.  This knocks down one silver-lining narrative of the global economic crisis: that more people will take the opportunity to work for themselves as big corporations shed jobs.

The 18-month contraction that started in December 2007 initially resulted in more would-be business owners, as the number of people who work for themselves grew to 16.3 million in July 2008 from 15.7 million at the end of 2007, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since then, the total has fallen about 10 percent to 14.7 million in July, the data show.

Employer businesses - those that provide work for individuals including the founder - "have been starting in fewer numbers, with fewer workers and growing at a slower pace than in the past," according to Robert Litan, a vice president at the Kauffman Foundation, which supports research on startups. "Therefore, these entrepreneurs are generating increasingly fewer new jobs for the U.S. labor market."

The number of new employer businesses dropped 24 percent to 505,473 on an annual basis in 2010 from 667,341 in 2006, according to Litan, who co-wrote a report published in July on small-business job creation.

Read Economy knocks self-employed out of business here.

The Kauffman Foundation report to which the article refers provides helpful detail and analysis of the loss of jobs among small businesses and startups.  We'll share just one chart from the report that illustrates the central point of Jackson and Feld's reporting:

Read Starting Smaller; Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation here.