To listen to Donald Trump describe the American economy is to hear about a horrifying alternate reality in which the recession that started at the end of 2007 is still with us. The truth is very different. The recovery that began in the middle of 2009, though not perfect, has steadily created jobs and lifted wages.

More than 15.2 million jobs have been added since early 2010. The 4.9 percent unemployment rate is half of what it was in the depths of the recession in 2009. On Friday, in its monthly employment report, the Department of Labor said that average hourly wages jumped 2.8 percent, to $25.92, in October from a year earlier, the biggest such increase since 2008.

Add these findings to a recent report from the Census Bureau showing a decline in the number of people in poverty and the percentage of people without health insurance, and it is clear that by almost every economic measure the country is doing better than it was just a few years ago.

Mr. Trump refuses to acknowledge these truths, presumably because he believes that his best shot at the White House is to insist that the economy is in terrible shape and that he alone can fix it. When the data don’t agree with his dystopian vision, he calls them “phony numbers.” His campaign called Friday’s employment report “disastrous.” Little wonder that 370 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners, have signed a letter denouncing him for peddling “magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.”