Marc Matsumoto loves to cook. As a kid, he baked his own birthday cake. And last year, he started a blog at norecipes.com to celebrate freestyle culinary arts.

But as the head of marketing at a finance-related start-up in New York, he spent long hours at the office. He could shop for groceries only on weekends. Until December, that is. Shortly before Christmas, his employer failed to secure another round of venture capital, and Matsumoto joined the 4.4 million Americans who've lost their jobs since 2007.

It could have been a crisis. Instead, Matsumoto drummed up enough consulting gigs to pay the bills. Then he threw himself into building his "dream job" as a food personality. Now, he spends his weekdays perusing farmers markets, cooking pork cheek ragout and using his marketing skills to lure 50,000 unique visitors to norecipes.com last month. Becoming a free agent was a bit of a "forced move," he says, "but now that I'm doing it, I actually kind of like it. I wonder why I didn't do it sooner."

He's not the only one who feels that way. A new survey from staffing agency Kelly Services finds that 26% of U.S. workers are now free agents -- freelancers, contractors, small-business owners, etc. That's up from 19% in 2006. Blame the economy for the spike, but while many of these new free agents are experiencing "forced risk taking," as Kelly CEO Carl Camden puts it, they still claim to be "much happier" on the job than employees.

Indeed, because free agency is good for the economy, too, the rise in self-employment is one of the few upsides coming out of this increasingly gloomy recession.

Changing dynamics

Though free agency has a long history (think colonial shopkeepers), economists attribute its modern re-emergence to several factors. The Internet makes launching businesses easy. Corporations outsource everything from publicity to headhunting these days, and professionals increasingly want autonomous, flexible work. Broadly, self-employment is becoming less countercyclical. People don't work for themselves just because they can't find other jobs. A recent report from New York City's comptroller found that self-employment accounted for 491,000 of the 773,000 jobs the city gained during the generally fat years of 1981 to 2006.

Nonetheless, a deep recession can make self-employment rates jump. Joe Favorito, for instance, a longtime sports marketer, waded into the free-agent life last summer. He had worked for the N.Y. Knicks basketball team and other places before helping launch the International Fight League. It went bankrupt last year. "I never wanted to do this," he says.