Catching up on my pile of ?this is interesting but I’m not sure what to do with it? clips and reports, I re-read a Wall Street Journal editorial of Feb. 3 on recent economic news. Noting that upward revisions of late-2006 numbers for job creation had yielded an increase of 2.2 million jobs for the year, the editorialist argued that economic performance since 2001 had been both strong and underappreciated.

The Journal cited work by economist Michael Darda that deserves some emphasis. He compared economic data for the first five years of the 1991-2000 expansion with the first five years of the current one. Here are two of his findings:

Unemployment
1991-96: averaged 6.4 percent
2001-06: averaged 5.4 percent

Real Wage Growth
1991-96: averaged 0.6 percent annually
2001-06: averaged 1.5 percent annually