With today’s jobs report we can look at the entirety of 2017—putting the year as a whole in perspective and comparing 2017 with 2007, the last business cycle peak before the Great Recession began. Yesterday, I provided a fairly broad overview of the year with context since the last business cycle peak before the Great Recession (2007) and the last time the U.S. economy was at full employment (2000).

As the recovery has strengthened we’ve seen improvements in all measures of employment, unemployment, and wage growth. These measures tell a consistent story—an economy on its way to full employment, but not there yet. Taking a data-driven approach to policymaking would mean continuing to push, keeping interest rates low and letting the economy recover for Americans across genders, races, ethnicities, and levels of educational attainment.

Payroll employment growth in December was 148,000, bringing average job growth in 2017 to 171,000. The figure below shows average employment growth over the last several years. While more than enough to keep up with population growth and pull in workers from the sidelines, job growth in 2017 was noticeably slower than in recent years.

In December, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 percent. Taking 2017 as a whole, the unemployment rate averaged 4.4 percent. Using the last time the economy was at full employment as a benchmark—2000—it’s clear there’s still room for improvement. The unemployment rate averaged 4.0 percent in 2000, and fell below 4.0 percent for five months. Given that 2000 saw no pronounced acceleration of inflation, and given that inflation remains below the Federal Reserve’s preferred target today, it’s safe to say that the unemployment rate can continue to fall without risking rapidly accelerating inflation.

In the past, when the monthly unemployment rate has been 4.4 percent (the full year average in 2017) we typically have seen far higher shares of the prime-age population with a job. The figure below compares the prime-age employment to population ratio (EPOP) in April and August 2017, when the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent, with the EPOP in the months during the last two business cycles when the unemployment rate was also 4.4 percent. As you can see, despite the low unemployment rate, there are still workers sitting on the sidelines because of weakness in today’s economy.

Though a notably volatile series, the black unemployment rate hit a new low this month (6.8 percent), but still remains significantly higher than the white unemployment rate. The figure below shows the unemployment rate for white, black, and Hispanic workers since 1995. Because the roughly 2:1 ratio of black to white unemployment rates—historically accurate but not immutable with policy—each additional reduction in overall unemployment that can be attained actually provides disproportionate benefits to workers of color. Given that workers of color have historically faced discriminatory barriers to labor market success, this is an enormously valuable benefit to chasing full employment.

Two other important indicators, the prime-age EPOP and nominal wage growth, are still far lower than would be expected in a stronger economy. Prime-age EPOP has been one of the major indicators lagging behind in the recovery. As shown in the figure below, the prime-age EPOP has been slowly but fairly steadily improving since it bottomed out in 2010, hitting a recovery-high of 79.1 percent in December—but the graph also shows recent relevant benchmarks with which to judge the prime-age EPOP’s progress. The share of the prime-age population with a job remains far below its high points in both of the last two recoveries. In a stronger economy, we would expect a greater share of prime-working-age workers to actually have a job. If the economy continues to improve as it has over the last year, more people will be pulled off the sidelines and back into the labor force.

Year-over-year nominal hourly wages grew at 2.5 percent in December. The figure below shows nominal wage growth over the last 10 years. Wage growth remains below levels consistent with the Fed’s target inflation rate and trend productivity growth, and is simply not putting worrisome upward pressure on inflation. The labor market—and surely the workers in it—can withstand stronger wage growth for a sustained period of time. Wages will rise faster when employers need to compete more for workers, rather than the other way around.