Want your cubicle back? Too bad.

A blog entry in The New York Times traces job losses for both wage-workers and self-employed types in 2008 and 2009. The pace of job loss has slowed for self-employed workers, and writer Scott A. Shane, a professor at Case Western, asks readers to theorize on why this might be.

Any minute now some government economist is going to declare this to be a good indicator that things are starting to turn around. I won’t buy it. and here’s why.

Before the Neo-Depression hit, we were a country increasingly in love with the idea of self-employment. Along with that Bill Gates/Nirvana model of a lonely genius or two and their potentially lucrative start-up, a lot of people just love the idea of escaping the confines of an office where a boss always looms, where time clocks and dress codes exist. (As a bonus, self-employed people rarely get charged with harassment or creating a hostile work environment by making an off-color remark.)

But self-employment comes with the downside of financial insecurity. When I worked for a newspaper, an unproductive week might have earned me a few glares from my editor, but I still got paid. These days, a slow week means no money and glares from my creditors.

In flush times, this no-money glitch drives a lot of us back to selling our souls to the company store. But in the current rotten job market, there are no easy ways for we PJ-wearing homeworkers to slink back into the 9-to-5.

Hence, we stay put, and that’s why that graf in the NYT blog item shows the job-loss rate for self-employed folks flattening out.