Is it finally over, this ghastly jobless recovery that has hurt so many Americans? That's the tempting question after Friday's report that the economy added 200,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent.

It's too early to tell whether this is the beginning of a trend of significant job growth or another false start. No matter, the American jobs machine will continue to face challenges not seen since the Great Depression.

First, the undeniably good aspects of this report: It is above the minimum of 125,000 jobs necessary to accommodate those naturally entering the workforce each month. Hours and wages moved up. The broadest measure of unemployment, which includes part-timers seeking full-time work, fell to 15.2 percent. That, and the 8.5 percent rate, were the lowest since February 2009, the first full month of President Obama's term.

Digging deeper reveals data that make it difficult to predict a trend. For example, government cut only 12,000 jobs in December. Yet the Obama stimulus is running out, and pressure continues to trim jobs at the federal, state and local level. Also, the holidays probably added some short-term jobs, even though the Labor Department tries to adjust for seasonal hiring.

(December numbers for Washington and the Seattle area have not yet been released. In November, the jobless rate was 8.7 percent statewide — the same as the revised national rate — and 8.2 percent for the Seattle area.)

Now, the bad: Workers have been dropping out of the labor force or never entering it because of the dismal employment situation. Economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute points out that if these people were counted as unemployed the rate would be 9.5 percent. Other economists say the rate would be even higher.

This labor-force participation rate fell from 64.6 to 64 percent over the past two years. Another measure, the employment-to-population ratio, rose from 58.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 58.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. In the first quarter of 2007, before the downturn hit, it stood at 63.3 percent.

The differential between college-educated workers and those with only high-school diplomas continued to be stark. Unemployment among those who didn't complete high school is three times higher than those with a bachelor's degree. Also, the average duration of unemployment was 40.8 weeks, the second-highest rate since the recession began.

Finally, the ugly: The Hamilton Project, an economic think tank begun by the Brookings Institution, estimates that if the economy created 208,000 jobs per month, the best rate seen during the 2000s, it would take more than 12 years to close the jobs gap left by the Great Recession.

Bump that up to 321,000 jobs per month, the average monthly rate for the top year of job creation in the 1990s, and it would still take five years for the economy to return to prerecession levels.

December's numbers give little indication that we're adding high-paid, good-benefits jobs in large numbers. Couriers were one big gainer. Indeed, evidence keeps mounting that beyond stagnant wages, Americans face less economic mobility than people in many advanced nations or in the America of the past. (I write about this in The Times' Pacific Northwest magazine this Sunday.)

We remain in a business cycle very different from those of the post-World War II era. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that technological changes and productivity gains have fundamentally disrupted the old labor market. We face a long transition and, he argues, the need for massive government spending on such things as infrastructure to regain jobs.

That's politically impossible. So we will keep watching the monthly numbers, hoping for the best.

You may reach Jon Talton at jtalton@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @jontalton.