My neighborhood has three gourmet coffee shops. Each offers its own blend of ironic artwork, freebie newspapers thick with movie and personal ads, and exotic beans from distant locales. Day in and day out, all are busy with healthy, literate patrons with one thing in common. None seem to work for a living.

Over the past several months, I thought I'd been seeing an awful lot of apparently talented people doing virtually nothing. My friends also noted the burgeoning numbers of the fashionably non-working. "It's odd," one said. "These are people who look and sound competent, yet they are choosing not to work."

I wondered if these impressions really meant anything. Then the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest jobs report last week. Incredibly, it seems 900,000 Americans simply vanished from the workforce last month. Even more astonishing, the number of people who could work but elected not to do so grew by 1.7 million in 2001. That's the largest annual increase since World War II.

According to the government's data, these aren't people who are discouraged from looking for a job or recently unemployed. They are folks who once were part of the labor force but now just don't care to work. "Let's roll," the President says, is the motto of our newly energized nation. If the latest numbers are right, "Just quit, baby!" might be closer to the truth.

The apparent trend towards non-work may explain the oddly muted public response to the current recession. To be sure, there are now well over 2 million more unemployed Americans than in mid-2000, a whopping 40 percent increase in a few short months. And 1.4 million workers have been laid off since last March. These are people who are actively looking for jobs but can't find them. They are still part of the workforce in the government's data.

Normally, unemployment on this scale would trigger daily headlines of woe. But most of the pain has fallen on the blue collar, working and middle classes. Job losses have been particularly ghastly in old-fashioned sectors like manufacturing, warehousing or shipping. Our leading opinion makers long ago ceased caring about these industries. The faster they can be shipped off to places like China or Mexico, the better.

The staggering collapse of the stock-market dominated "new economy," however, might have been expected to trigger a greater sense of worry. But it hasn't, really. For many unemployed information agers, the recession seemed a blessed relief, not a personal catastrophe.

When the fire abruptly went out from under new economy hotbeds like the Bay Area, for instance, the buzz was that everyone had taken a vacation or gone on sabbatical. Out of business? Great--let's go trekking.

For the first time in history, we may be seeing what happens when large numbers of Americans simply refuse to participate in an economic downturn. Rather than cope with the distasteful struggle of doing business in tough times, hundreds of thousands of highly educated, talented citizens are choosing to do nothing. "Gone fishing" is their contribution. Flash me an email when the recession's over.

Perhaps this is a good thing. "At least they're not taking jobs from people who really need them," my daughter says. "And maybe they're helping save the environment."

Unlikely, I think. What seems to have pushed a large number of highly productive Americans into coffee shops is the lack of politically correct options for getting rich. During the 1990s, anything remotely related to the new economy was somehow immune from the typical hostility business skeptics heaped on just about any other business. Information agers were treated like movie stars--fabulously wealthy, pampered, self-indulgent yet cool.

Never mind that stock market misrepresentation and profiteering was widespread throughout their industry. Nor did it matter that wealth distribution was strikingly skewed. Web pages and stock funds, microchips and modems were good and fine sources of income. Even the most pure of heart, like Ralph Nader, could become multimillionaires by investing in such enterprises without a shred of hypocrisy or guilt.

Now the new economy elite has nowhere to go. Only government and academics offer jobs with an acceptably "progressive" patina, but each, alas, has crummy pay. For many information age high-fliers, sipping coffee is the more preferable, if not the only option.

If such sentiments help explain the government's bizarre survey results, they may herald an even stranger recovery. It's unlikely that our country has ever had so many of its better educated citizens take a rain check on a recession. One obvious, and not just a little ironic consequence of such behavior is that giant corporations will increasingly dominate whatever survives of the new economy. If entrepreneurs take a powder during down times, they will leave the field to the more enduring institutional businesses many of them disdain.

That's already taking place. IBM, ATT, SBC and a handful of other corporate logos are reshaping the information age as the now timid "geniuses" of the last decade sit on the sidelines.

Stranger still, it may be that a "recovery" of sorts can be cobbled together more from people quitting the workforce than by actually creating new jobs. The government's latest data, for example, reported that the nation's unemployment rate fell from 5.8 percent to 5.6 percent from December to January. Pundits hailed the news as a sign that the recession was ending.

But America actually lost nearly 100,000 jobs during this period. What happened was that workers quit the labor force much faster than firms could fire employees. The nation's total workforce markedly shrank, and so the difference between people working and those still in the labor market, but not employed, also fell. As a result, the unemployment rate magically declined.

Amid such confusing phenomena, latte lines may well be a more telling economic indicator. If we can't lure seemingly dispirited, talented workers from their coffee shop limbo, brewing a vibrant recovery may prove difficult indeed.