The September jobs numbers are the 2018 United States economy in a nutshell: Even when an economic report is bad these days, it’s actually pretty good. When the latest numbers first were broadcast at 8:30 a.m. Friday, it looked like a big disappointment. Employers added only 134,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, well below the levels of recent months and well below what forecasters had projected. But even apart from the usual warnings about statistical error and randomness (the true rate of job creation could turn out to be either much higher or much lower), the numbers are a...