There are some problems with that measure. It includes people who are not working and who have no desire whatsoever to do so. It includes 17 year-old high school students, 80-year-old retirees, disabled adults and parents who voluntarily stay home with their children. Moreover, if Mr. Trump wants to focus on this measure, he may not be pleased with the results. Because the baby boom generation is hitting retirement age and voluntarily stepping out of the labor force, this measure of non-employment is likely to rise in the years ahead.

Share of prime-age population not employed. One way to avoid the most obvious problems with that measure is simply to limit the age bracket you look at. Jordan Weissmann at Slate argues that a better all-encompassing measure of the health of the job market is the share of the population between ages 25 to 54 who are working. That number was 78.2 percent in January, so its remainder implies a 21.8 percent jobless rate. This still isn’t perfect — it includes people who fall in that age bracket who have no desire to work, and also fails to include people under 25 or over 54 who really do want a job but can’t find one. But as a quick-and-dirty measure of the health of the labor market, Mr. Weissmann is right that you could do a lot worse.

Average hourly earnings. A common complaint about media focus on how many jobs are being created is that it doesn’t account for whether they are good jobs. But this is a tricky concept to measure; everyone can agree that a minimum-wage, burger-flipping position is not as ideal as a highly paid computer programming gig, but it’s hard to get at more subtle differences. Is a job as a truck driver better or worse than one as a hotel assistant manager? It’s pretty subjective.

What isn’t subjective is compensation. And data on average hourly earnings helps convey not just whether people are getting raises for existing jobs, but also whether the composition of jobs in the economy is shifting toward higher pay. Average hourly earnings for all private sector employees was $26 in January, and for nonmanagerial private sector employees it was $21.84.

An economy in which those numbers rise significantly faster than inflation is an economy in which working-class people are feeling better about the world and are seeing greater rewards for their labor.

There are plenty more options for the Trump administration to consider as job market measures to emphasize. Unemployment in the construction sector (currently 9.4 percent)? The jobless rate among people who didn’t go to college (currently 5.8 percent)? The options are nearly endless.

But — and this is important — if the president wants to set a different measure of the job market for his administration to focus on and improve, it would be best if he could let us know what it is now, so that we can really assess whether things are getting better or worse during his presidency.