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Article snippet: Over the last few months, incoming numbers on the job market made it seem that the United States was closing in on full employment — the state where very nearly everyone who wants a job has one, and efforts to boost the economy further just create inflation. The June numbers released Friday are a big “not so fast” moment for that theory. In their particulars, the latest numbers are more consistent with an economy that has some room to run. This economic expansion, now eight years old, may have some life in it yet. If the economy were at full employment, we would expect the rate at which employers were adding jobs to slow down. You can’t add workers to your payrolls if there are no workers to take those jobs. And as recently as a month ago it appeared that job growth was slowing down — not in an alarming way, but in the way you might expect in a job market that was becoming tight. Never mind. In June, the nation added 222,000 jobs, and previous months’ job growth numbers were revised up by a combined 47,000. That was enough to push the average monthly job gains for the first half of 2017 to 180,000, basically the same as the 187,000 average in 2016. It had seemed that job growth was decelerating this year, but that no longer appears so (or at least, if it is so, we’ll need a few more months of data to prove it). Part of the reason this strong job growth is taking place despite a low unemployment rate is that there were, in June at least, more people coming into th... Link to the full article to read more