On Friday, the government reported that the economy added 215,000 jobs last month, and that the unemployment rate remained a low 5 percent. That could support a decision by the Federal Reserve Board to raise its key interest rate in September. But the absence of inflation and of a significant increase in hourly wages, and the continued low labor-force participation rate can be taken by chairwoman Janet Yellen and her colleagues as reason to delay their planned 0.25 percent increase until early 2016, giving the Bank of England an opportunity to beat the Fed in the race to rate normality. All of which tells us very little about the fundamental forces determining the future shape of the U.S. labor market.

It is beyond doubt that rising income inequality will be a key issue in the 2016 congressional and presidential elections. That concern has already led to two major government interventions that are changing the U.S. labor market, most likely permanently. One is a successful move to raise the legal minimum wage. Many state and local governments are adopting a legal minimum of $15 per hour, well above the federal minimum of $7.25, unchanged since 2009. Whether these increases, most recently adopted in New York State but applied only to fast-food workers, will destroy jobs by making the unskilled too costly to hire, or increase jobs by adding to workers’ purchasing power, is the subject of a decidedly uncalm debate. Workers who do not lose jobs and who will benefit include the poor and the not-poor, the latter because many fast-food workers live at home with their relatively affluent families. And some of the poor, fearing that higher incomes will cause the loss of entitlements, are said to be cutting back on the hours they work, collecting the new higher minimum for those fewer hours, and retaining entitlements.