A Victor, Not a Butcher - Statistics, A Scorecard for Life?

I was in Borders the other day and I saw the book, A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant's Overlooked Military Genius, about... you guessed it, Ulysses S. Grant. Basically, the book said that unlike his reputation as a general who needlessly squandered lives in order to make up for his lack of strategic skill (especially compared to the venerable and brilliant Robert E. Lee), Grant had lower losses in terms of the percentage of his overall number of his troops killed than did Robert E. Lee, and that people who characterized Grant as a butcher (after the war) only did so to satisfy the pride of resentful Southerners.

Without going into a high school history class walk down memory lane, the thing that struck me was how statistics are almost always invariably used as the standard for judging whether something subjective and theoretical is in fact objective and real...like this theory about Grant being a butcher.

Is/Are Statistics the Scorecard for life? What are the implications for this in a data rich society and information based economy? ...Stay tuned and find out.