Job market thrives. Answering 3 questions may tell us how long it will last

The October employment numbers feature everything you might hope for in a jobs report.

Employers keep creating jobs at a healthy clip — 250,000 of them in October — a boom that was apparent in every major sector and that continued unabated even as the U.S. economy inched closer to full employment.

The unemployment rate remained at a multi-decade low of 3.7 percent. More notably, the proportion of the population either working or looking for work rose 0.2 percent. The number of adults not in the labor force at all fell by 487,000.

And employers evidently needed to pay higher wages to coax these workers off the sidelines. Long the soft underbelly of this expansion, average hourly earnings are now up 3.1 percent over the past year, from 2.