[topspin]

> Once he had these marvelous tools he found nails everywhere.

He also found two presidents and a sycophantic media that hung on his every word.

His figures were excellent. In the earliest days of Vietnam, long before anyone outside of Asia could find it on a map, he produced eerily precise predictions of the costs -- in lives, dollars and time -- of the future conflict. He told them what a civil war in the jungle would look like and they pulled the trigger.

As far as the value of measurement goes; I think most of the low hanging fruit has been picked (a consequence of the "Information Age") and what we struggle to 'measure' today is far less tractable. As a result our measurements are frequently corrupted in the service of prevailing agendas or not permitted at all for fear of undesirable results.