Perhaps most revealing, he seemed open to the possibility that workers should r eclaim a higher share of the nation’s economic output.

Representative Denny Heck, Democrat of Washington, said, “Why hasn’t the Fed called out more than a generation of lack of wage growth?”

“Go back to the turn of the century: What you saw was a decline in the labor share, and that has not been reversed,” Mr. Powell said, using a term for the share of national income that goes to workers in the form of pay and benefits.

“We’re missing 10 years of growth,” he continued. “I think that’s really the underlying problem. We’re getting reasonable wage growth, but we missed all of those years beginning at the beginning of the century. It’s a very serious problem, and we should do a better job of calling it out.”

By contrast, not long ago, Mr. Powell and other leaders of the central bank were proceeding on the assumption that the job market did not have room to get much better without setting off an inflationary spiral.

In a 2017 speech, for example, when he was a Fed governor, Mr. Powell said that estimates of the long-term rate of unemployment indicated that “the unemployment rate gap has essentially been closed” and that “a variety of other measures also suggest that we are close to maximum employment.”

The unemployment rate was 4.7 percent that month, and it has fallen a full percentage point since, with no evident rise in inflation.