As you may have heard, the economy added three hundred and twenty-one thousand jobs in November. That was a much larger figure than analysts were expecting, and it prompted President Obama to take a lap of honor around the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Well, not quite, but he did bring up the employment figures during a ceremony to announce his choice for the new Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter, and who can blame him?

For months now, it has been clear that there’s a disconnect between the President’s approval rating on domestic issues and what’s actually happening to the economy. (I wrote about this back in October.) With the Labor Department’s latest employment report also showing tentative signs of a rise in wages, the White House will be hoping that public perception starts to catch up with reality. “It has been a long road to recovery from the worst economic crisis in generations, and we still have a lot more work to do to,” Obama said. “But it’s worth us, every once in a while, reflecting on the fact that the American economy is making real progress.”

It’s dangerous to read too much into a single month’s figures—the payroll numbers bounce around, there’s a good deal of statistical uncertainty to them, and they always get revised (twice). But if you look beyond this month’s headline figure and set politics aside, the underlying trends are encouraging.

While the economy still hasn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession, it’s finally growing at a rate above its long-term trend of about 2.5 per cent. (In the latest quarter, the growth rate was 3.9 per cent, according to the Commerce Department.) That’s what’s supposed to happen during recoveries. Rapid G.D.P. growth generates big job gains, bids up wages, and draws discouraged workers back into the labor force. During this recovery, which began way back in 2009, we haven’t seen anything like that sort of growth. But now, finally, it appears to be happening.

The November report isn’t a one-off. Since September, the economy has added about two hundred and eighty thousand jobs a month, on average. That represents a significant step up from the previous nine months, when the monthly payrolls figure averaged about two hundred and ten thousand. Over time, job gains of this nature add up to substantial gains in over-all employment. In the past two years, the total number of people employed in the non-farm sector of the U.S. economy, which means the great majority of the economy, has risen from 134.9 million to slightly more than a hundred and forty million. That’s a big jump.

During the same period, the unemployment rate has fallen from 7.8 per cent to 5.8 per cent. Somewhat surprisingly, it remained steady last month, reflecting the fact that it is based on a survey different from the one that generates the payroll figures. (The payroll numbers come from a survey of firms; the jobless numbers come from a survey of households.) But the trend in the jobless rate is clearly downward.

At some point, if the unemployment rate keeps falling, employers will find it more difficult to hire workers, and they will be forced to offer higher wages. That’s what happened in the late nineteen-nineties, which was the last time American workers saw their inflation-adjusted earnings rise in any appreciable fashion. After Friday’s figures came out, some news accounts suggested that the moment when wages take off might be upon us. The report showed that average hourly earnings went from $24.57 in October to $24.66 in November—an increase of about 0.37 per cent.

That’s good news, but nine cents is just nine cents. Among production and non-supervisory employees—i.e., ordinary working stiffs—the increase in hourly earnings was even smaller: just four cents, in fact. At this stage, it’s premature to suggest that the long period of wage stagnation is over. Before we could be sure that wages are outstripping inflation, we’d need to see sizable gains being sustained over several months, or longer. As the Wall Street Journal’s Damian Paletta pointed out, we’ve seen such rises before, and they’ve turned out to be blips.

Still, the uptick in wages is a hopeful sign. And so is the fact, highlighted by Jason Furman, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, that at least some of the expansion in payrolls is taking place in industries that pay decent wages. Employment in manufacturing rose by twenty-eight thousand in November, and the financial sector added twenty thousand new positions.

As always, there are caveats. A sizable proportion of the employment gains came in retailing and food services, where wages tend to be low and some of the hiring may have been seasonal. But, all in all, the new jobs report was a very positive one, and it’s worthy of some pre-Christmas celebration.