By Julia Coronado

Julia Coronado, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, is the founder of the research firm MacroPolicy Perspectives and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Early Friday, the government reported that the economy added 850,000 jobs last month — a welcome pickup from the slower pace of jobs growth over the past three months and a sign that overall economic growth is tracking stronger than in the first quarter of the year. We are still roughly seven million jobs down from prepandemic levels of employment, unemployment among Black and Hispanic workers remains distressingly high, and millions have yet to return to the labor force. But if policymakers hold steady, we are also on the verge of creating a foundation for a more inclusive, resilient recovery — much more robust than what we experienced after the Great Recession, despite having suffered a much bigger jobs hit.

Recoveries from recessions can often feature a burst of pent-up demand, but the current boom has few precedents. If the Federal Reserve is right in its forecast that economic growth will reach 7 percent in 2021, it will be the strongest performance since the recovery from the double-dip recession of the early 1980s. But this good news is no accident.

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