Brad DeLong explains why the Obama administration's forecasts of unemployment numbers for 2009 undershot the actual mark by such a large margin. (There are about 2.5 million fewer jobs now than projected for the end of 2009, according to a report from the NYT.) The blame goes to the bureaucracy, which strapped the White House January budget process to outdated December projections from the transition team, DeLong says. Grimmer late-January indicators of worsening prospects for the job market couldn't be incorporated without rehashing all of January's work. What's the solution? Monthly forecasts that are detached from the budget process, he says.

Paul Krugman's only post for the day takes a roundabout route to self-defense by disputing Thomas Malthus' place in history as a hack. (Malthus was an 18th-19th century political economist who's most influential thesis was that population growth exhausts limited natural resources and leads to doom.) Sure, Malthus "was wrong about ... the two centuries that followed the publication of his work," says Krugman. But he got his analysis of the other 58 right, argues the professor. So, it's not really an insult to compare Krugman to him, the professor suggests to his detractors.

Barry Ritholtz shares a few charts, including one that cuts unemployment numbers from a different angle than the usual payroll numbers. There are more than five people unemployed for every single job opening, according to the data via David Rosenberg. Ritholtz also pointed to usaspending.gov, a new site that publishes data on government fiscal spending. But in either a poorly executed attempt at sarcasm or an uncharacteristically naïve moment, he was "surprised to see that the top 5 vendors are all defense contractors."

Felix Salmon deserves a round of applause for acknowledging in a lengthy, (almost) humble entry that financial bloggers are impossible to read. The responsibility to make complex, important issues intelligible should fall on him and other wonks in the econosphere; they could be doing "a much greater public service if [they] generally wrote [their] blog entries in English rather than in financial shorthand." We think it's a great idea (even though it would put us out of a job. Or maybe just an internship).