Nation-building in particular has never been so easy. The formula goes like this: Assemble a blizzard of statistics, pinpoint a novel trend, interview a group of people who will corroborate the trend, mix everything into a rich sociological bouillabaisse and - voila! - you've got yourself a new nation.

The latest colony to proclaim independence is Free Agent Nation, at least according to a new book by that title from Daniel Pink, a former Al Gore speechwriter and current Fast Company scribe.

A one-time government employee, Pink knows how to pile on the statistics. He counts 33 million free agents in America. Of those, 16.5 million soloists - aka independent contractors, freelancers, "e-lancers" - live from invoice to invoice, performing for the highest bidder. Three and a half million temporary workers are "free agents by default," Pink writes, either inhabiting the netherworld of temp slavery or flying high at boutique agencies like CFOs2Go. Then there are the 13 million "exceptionally small" businesses, often no more than one mom and one pop working out of their second bedroom.

Pink weaves these disparate groups into a revolutionary proletariat. "America's new economic emblem is the footloose, independent worker - the tech-savvy, self-reliant, path-charting micropreneur," he enthuses.

Like any good ethnographer, Pink "discovers" a new tribe and meticulously documents its social order. Members of the free-agent tribe hold meetings at Starbucks, catch up with neighborhood gossip at Mail Boxes Etc., belly up to the counter at Kinko's ("the Cheers bar of Free Agent Nation") and socialize at newfangled "entreprenetworking" groups. These places form the infrastructure of a brave new workplace, one that Pink repeatedly sets in opposition to the more hive-minded 1950s workplace William H. Whyte invented in The Organization Man.

For all its half-baked futurology, free-form jargonizing and righteous self-actualization, Free Agent Nation is an entertaining book that brings to life an intriguing cultural trend. One of the most fascinating chapters details the "time studies" Pink assembled from interviewing hundreds of self-described free agents. Each workday, these diarists spent an hour reading and writing e-mail, 36 minutes on the phone, 43 minutes marketing themselves, 38 minutes in meetings and 36 minutes in the car. Free agency doesn't look all that different from traditional cubicle living.

If you trust Pink's way-new math, one in four U.S. workers is a free agent. That's a whole lot of lattes. People living in new-economy Shangri-las like San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles may have lots of friends who pump out JavaScript from their home offices, but what about folks in Boise, Idaho, and Birmingham, Ala.? Pink also tends to gloss over the "agency" of this collective mass, conflating the dot-com marketing consultant with the Manpower temp, the couple selling Beanie Babies on eBay with Dottie the semiretired greeter at Wal-Mart. Obviously, some of these workers are freer than others.

We've learned enough from recent demographic inventions such as Generation X that people may share one trait - like being in their 20s - but still not have much in common. In the case of Free Agent Nation, it takes more than a home office and a temporary badge to build a workers' paradise.