“Everything’s coming up roses,” a mother reassures her daughter in Gypsy, the 1959 musical chronicling the rise of burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. Were lyricist Stephen Sondheim surveying the American economy, he might want to extend the reassurance to the rest of us. For it does seem as if, at long last, as we celebrate the seventeenth anniversary of then-Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance” speech, everything is indeed coming up roses.  

Yesterday the government reported that 203,000 jobs were created in November, taking the unemployment rate down to 7.0 percent from 7.3 percent in October. The labor force participation rate—the portion of the civilian population that is either employed or looking for work—seems to have stabilized after a long decline from 67.1 percent in 2000, to 65.6 percent at the start of the recent recession, to a four-decade low of 62.8 percent in October, with 16-24 year-old workers leading the drop outs. That rate ticked up last month to 63.0 percent.