The Trump administration has become downright boastful about the state of the economy.

“In many ways this is the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America,” the president tweeted recently. After I analyzed the May employment data by consulting a thesaurus and writing a cheeky article using a lot of near-synonyms for “good,” the Trump administration blasted it out approvingly to the White House press list and through a presidential tweet.

But I also received some blowback from liberals. There were some similarly good months for job growth in the Obama administration, they noted. And my analysis was not nearly so effusive then.

So which is it? Is the economy doing exceptionally well, or performing only about as well as it did in the late years of the Obama administration?

The answer depends on precisely how you phrase the question, which in turn hinges on a crucial distinction that people often fail to make when talking about the economy. There’s a big difference between the level of economic performance; the direction of change in the economy; and the pace of change.