Phil Coop says he can pinpoint, almost to the day, when the 2001 recession began. At his Memphis-based company, EnSafe, which provides environmental and technical consulting to a range of industries, he reviews the firm's biweekly financial reports. The first 2001 report, coming in mid-January, was shocking: "I looked at our numbers, and they were awful, and the ones before that were fine," says Coop, EnSafe's CEO and president. He called his customers to find out what was happening. Sure enough, they told him, they had started pulling back in late December 2000.

It took the National Bureau of Economic Research 11 more months to see what Coop saw and to declare the nation in recession. And scarcely had it made the declaration than the fact of recovery seemed established. Yet brief as it seems to have been, this recession taught some useful lessons about what has--and hasn't--really changed in the economy. Recessions are helpful that way: By completing business cycles, they are the ultimate stress tests for economic theories. Among theories exploded this time around is the notion that recessions are a thing of the past. The U.S. economy's unprecedented growth span in the 1990s had beguiled some economists, not to mention many policymakers and Nasdaq investors, into postulating that the cycle of booms and busts was over.

This downturn was also a reminder of other constants. For example, energy prices still matter a lot--though in this case their decline was a major plus. But the recession also sharpened understanding of what is truly new and likely enduring in the so-called new economy--most notably, that worker productivity may well remain much higher than it was less than a decade ago.

Each recession, like each of Leo Tolstoy's unhappy families, has its own peculiarities. This one was unusual, first, because it seemed to happen so quickly. Normally, recessions creep up on America. Also, it was led by a sharp falloff in capital investment rather than by a slump in consumer spending, and it came at a time of tame inflation and falling interest rates. And there were other atypical lessons, among them:

The rich bleed, too. The 1982 recession hit blue collars. The 1990-91 recession hit white collars. This recession hit the no-collars: the super wealthy who can get by in a T-shirt without undermining their status. From high-profile bankruptcies to a sudden failure of confidence in the future, chief executives struggled much harder through this recession than through any of recent decades. "Business people are in the dumps," says William McDonough, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey showed that nearly half of executives of fast-growth companies found it more difficult to set budgets for 2002 than for the year before, simply because they had no idea what to expect. Compare that with the outlook of your average Joe: The Conference Board reported late last month that consumers' confidence in the economy rose by more than it had in 25 years.

That disconnect is not hard to understand. When workers went home last year, they saw the value of their houses rising, new cars (financed by zero-percent loans) lining their streets, and, chances are, delivery vans from local electronics and furniture stores. When their bosses mingled in gated communities, the talk was of options under water, margin loans coming due, and stagnating home values. In the Atlanta metro market, the median sale price for new homes, mostly aimed at high-end buyers, rose only 2 percent in 2001, according to Smart Numbers, an Atlanta research firm. By comparison, median prices for existing homes, favored by low- and middle-income households, rose about 8 percent.

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