ACCORDING to numerous economic indicators, the American economy is getting better.


According to the same indicators, the economy is not doing very well.


The accompanying charts illustrate that dual reality, and do so in ways that either the Barack Obama or Mitt Romney campaigns might choose to use if they were producing charts.


The short-term charts — the ones the Obama campaign might endorse — show the changes in four indicators since July 2010. They are consumer confidence in the current economic situation, new-car sales, new-home sales and unemployment. All have gotten substantially better during the period shown.


The other charts — think of them as the Romney ones — are based on the same data. But they show changes since December 2000.


Those dates were not, of course, chosen at random. The earlier date came at the end of a great economic boom, when the economy was running at full speed and arguably a little more. In those days, there were newspaper articles on how hard it was for companies to find workers. The unemployment rate was 3.9 percent.


The July 2010 date came a few months after the American economy hit bottom. The unemployment rate then was 9.5 percent, down from the peak of 10 percent but still very high.


Since then, the rate has declined to 8.1 percent. That decline of 1.4 percentage points looks pretty impressive on the short-term chart, while the same decline is far less impressive in the context of the longer term.


Perhaps the sharpest difference in the charts comes in new-home sales. They have rallied strongly in recent months, and the short-term chart makes that rally look quite strong. But those gains have pushed the annual rate of sales — based on the most recent three months of data — up to only 369,000 new homes. That is little more than a quarter of the rate in the heady days of 2005.


Car sales were strong and showed relatively little volatility during the years before the credit crisis and recession sent them plunging. The recovery since then has produced a rate of over 14 million sales per year, more than two million below the pace that once seemed normal.


The consumer confidence figures shown are for the current condition, as measured by the Conference Board. The index is based on answers to two questions: Are business conditions currently good, bad or normal? Are jobs plentiful, not so plentiful or hard to get?


Americans are a lot more confident than they were at the bottom. In the preliminary September results, released this week, 15.5 percent of respondents said they thought business conditions were good, while 33.3 percent thought they were bad. In July 2010, the figures were 8.8 percent and 43.3 percent. Those are significantly improved numbers.


But back in December 2000, 40.8 percent thought conditions were good, while just 9.5 percent deemed them to be bad.


Similarly, back in 2000, only 12.4 percent thought jobs were hard to get. By July 2010, that figure had leapt to 45.1 percent. Now it is down to 39.9 percent, a long way from boom times even if it is an improvement.


In the days of vaudeville, a staple joke had one comedian asking another, “How’s your wife?”


“Compared to what?” was the reply.


So it is with the economy. It is very good, compared to a couple of years ago. It is quite poor, compared to the good old days.