Research shows entrepreneurs are after what money can't buy.

Unless you were born into a business family, you probably make a quiet calculation once in a while and keep the result to yourself.

How much money would I be earning, you'd ask yourself, had I kept on working for so-and-so? The calculation is done conservatively so that the result does not completely overshadow your actual earnings. Thoughts then forlornly drift to the value of your business. At least it can be sold one day to make for a good pension, the thinking goes, then I'll beat my peers in the corporate world.

Of course one cannot generalise about business owners. You may be one of those too caught up in your project to be preoccupied with regrets about having started a business. Or one of the few too busy making lots of money. Besides, as the years go by and your business becomes a relatively comfortable space, the urge to compare it with what might have been fades. In fact, the thought of ever having to go back to work for someone else becomes increasingly unpalatable, no matter what the potential salary.

Yet the question lurks like a library book too late to return, surfacing accusingly every now and then, just to make everyone uncomfortable.

So a recent presentation in Johannesburg by top entrepreneurship researcher Scott Shane would have been painful for many business owners. It's just as well that most of us are far too busy to attend the many seminars, workshops, small-business weeks and entrepreneurship summits that are regularly organised by non-business owners, who never fail to be puzzled and disappointed by the lack of attendance by business owners.

Scott, a rare empiricist in the cultish field of entrepreneurship studies, urges us to look at what the research shows, and it's not a pretty sight.

Contrary to widespread belief, the small-business sector does not create wealth. Cohort study upon cohort study shows that the sum of all the money made by and all the money lost by people who start their own businesses add up to zero.

Economic growth drives business start-ups, contends Scott, business start-ups do not drive economic growth.

As for jobs, those that are created (and there are fewer than is widely believed) tend to be rather miserable, lacking basic employee benefits and not very stable.

Worst of all - for business owners at least - is the evidence that we work longer hours and earn less than we would have had we remained employees.

For those who haul out "passion" - that favourite mantra of the entrepreneurship cult - to explain business owners' long working hours, Scott counters with evidence that it is a serious sore point. We would rather be working less.

So why do business owners do it, then?

This is where Scott's theories become interesting - and less dismal. The business world, he says, is like the lotto. Masses take part and only a very few win. Only a handful of firms out of thousands of start-ups are responsible for true wealth creation.

Yet the astronomical odds against becoming a Google and the very real chance of losing money are of little concern to business owners. The research shows that we are more optimistic than the rest of the population.

But not necessarily foolish. The reason most business owners start up - and again Scott backs it up with research - is not to accumulate the money or the power of an empire. We do it exactly because we do not want to work for someone else, and we are willing to pay a price for our freedom.

Here is the clincher, from Shane's book Illusions of Entrepreneurship: "Entrepreneurship provides a very important nonfinancial benefit: it makes people happier. In a wide variety of countries, studies show that people who work for themselves have higher job satisfaction than people who work for others."

Okay, so we're not all going to become Mo Ibrahim or Mark Shuttleworth, but think about this: we are freedom-loving, optimistic, happy people. Put away that calculator. There are some things that money just can't buy.