To some extent, the divergent indicators reflect the fact that the numbers come from two surveys with different methodologies and, in recent years, differing trends. The jobs figure comes from a Labor Department survey of establishments and lately it has tended to produce gloomier numbers than the other survey the department performs, in which households are asked which members have jobs.

The trends are expected to be a little different, in that self-employed people would show up with jobs only in the household survey, while a person holding two jobs would be double-counted in the establishment survey. But the differences in this cycle have been substantial and are not easy to explain.

Even the household survey, with its more positive numbers, indicates that little progress on jobs has been made in this recovery. There has been almost no increase, by these statistics, in the percentage of working-age Americans who are working. The decline in the unemployment rate reflects the fact that fewer of those without jobs say they are looking for work, as is required to be counted as unemployed.

The job growth picture is also complicated now by the different nature of work in America.

Back in 1949, when the first postwar recession ended, slightly fewer than half the jobs were in private-sector service industries. Now the figure is more than two-thirds. In the same period, the government share of the civilian work force went up a couple of percentage points, to about a sixth.

The share of employment represented by private-sector goods-producing industries fell by more than half, to less than 17 percent from more than 37 percent. Employment in that sector peaked at 25.2 million people in 1979. Now it is 22.4 million, even though total employment is up 50 percent since 1979.