On the one hand, everybody on Capitol Hill loves small businesses. Small businesses, any of them will tell you, will drag our collective chestnuts out of the recessionary fire and lead the way back to good times.

On the other hand, nobody on Capitol Hill seems to be willing to refer to the probable current surge in nonemployer businesses as a positive development. They know that “forced entrepreneurship” is happening. They view it as a sign of a poor economic environment.

After all, if all those people had jobs, then they wouldn’t need to … what? Become entrepreneurs?

The most significant determinant of nonemployer firm births is the condition of the labor market, according to a new working paper released last month by the U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy. The final Advocacy release of 2009 was entitled The Nonemployer Startup Puzzle, written by Advocacy’s Brian Headd, and Zoltan Acs and Hezekiah [...]

It’s a well-established fact that the number of nonemployer businesses increases when the economy tanks. We won’t have the numbers for a couple of years yet but, when we look back on 2008, I have no doubt at all that we’ll see another large spike in self-employment.

And yet, there’s little evidence that the policy movers and shakes either know or care about all those single-person businesses, even as they consider how best to respond to this newly-declared recession.

That’s a problem.

In spite of the fact that microbusinesses make up better than 9 out of 10 U.S. firms, surprisingly little is known about them. That’s because there has been relatively little research done on them. What little is known about microbusinesses almost exclusively concerns microbusiness employers. Neither economic researchers nor federal lawmakers pay much attention to [...]