Opinion | What the heck is going on in the U.S. economy?

Once again, unemployment tied a half-century low in April, and the net hiring number came in stronger than economists had forecast (253,000, as opposed to about 180,000). In fact, in 12 of the past 13 months, the jobs numbers have beaten expectations. It’s not unusual for forecasts to be off. But it is weird that they’re consistently off in the same direction — i.e., always underestimating the strength of the labor market.

I proposed several possible explanations to this puzzle almost two months ago, including measurement issues, a general bias toward pessimism, longer-than-expected lags in consequences for monetary policy tightening, etc. I’m still not sure which of those hypotheses is right. But there are some additional signs that measurement could be an issue; the report released Friday included not only new numbers for April, but also some large revisions to data that has been released in prior months.

For example, the March job growth number got revised down by about a third between the first imprint and this latest update. So it might be wise not to take the gangbusters preliminary estimate for April completely at face value.

Nonetheless, some numbers in this report are worth celebrating if they’re even close to accurate. That includes the record-low measure of Black unemployment, and the record-high share of prime-working-age women who have jobs.