Jobs Report Gets a Participation Trophy

For anybody who was looking for clarity in Friday’s jobs report on whether America’s labor market is getting a little less tight—well, maybe next year.

The Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added a seasonally adjusted 210,000 jobs last month. Even with the proviso that there were upward revisions to the previous two months’ job figures, that was well short of the 573,000 that economists were looking for.