Analysts hoping to rebut the purveyors of gloom who are arguing that America is in long-term decline were looking to Friday’s job report for comfort. They got none. Instead of continuing to create about 200,000 each month, the economy produced a mere 142,000 new payroll jobs, and only 134,000 in the private sector. To add a bit more gloom, it turns out that 28,000 fewer jobs were created in June and July than originally reported, and that the labor force participation rate remains stuck at historically low levels. Janet Yellen’s refusal to side with the hawks who want immediate increases in interest rates is vindicated. Economists, many of whom were forecasting 200,000+ new jobs, are scrambling to save face. They point out that the August figure is revised more often than any other.

That pattern of revision may well be repeated. But even if there are major upward revisions, more than a few of this country’s best economists will hold to their belief that monthly data—jobs, factory output, retail sales—are irrelevant to the problem that is ailing America—secular stagnation. Definitions vary, but its basic meaning is that the economy’s historic potential, its ability to produce goods, services and rising prosperity, can no longer be fully realized. We are in the midst of a new normal of slow growth, perhaps 1.4-to-2 percent per annum. And there is no consensus as to the cure for this debilitating malady. Unless real interest rates are driven below zero to stimulate spending and investments, or raised to prevent inflation; or governments spend more, or become more tight-wadish; or raise taxes, or lower them; or incomes are redistributed to lower earners with a higher propensity to spend, or to higher earners more willing to invest, or… add your preferred medicine to the long and at times conflicting prescriptions of important economists, whose views are set out in a valuable ebook published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).