Nonfarm payrolls increased by a meager 142,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate fell 0.1 percentage point to 6.1 percent.  How much more should the Federal Reserve do to put people back to work? Can the Fed do anything about this seemingly intractable problem?

An unemployment rate of 6.1 percent doesn’t sound especially woeful — but that’s just one indicator, and it’s not the most revealing. Consider, for example, how far employment among people in their prime working years remains from “normal,” or the level that prevailed before the last recession. As of August, about 76.7 percent of people aged 25 to 54 were employed, according to seasonally unadjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a significant improvement over August 2011, when the employment-to-population ratio was at a low of 75 percent (see chart). But it’s still about 3.9 million jobs short of 79.8 percent, the average ratio over the 10 years through 2007.  Cleveland Federal Reserve Job report