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That isn't in fact what's happened. Instead, the people who deploy these improved techniques actually begin to believe that they control more than they actually do, and that their very real powers, which can appear almost magical in the right context (shock and awe, anyone?) have somehow allowed them to categorically banish unintended consequences. There's an ancient Greek word for this kind of self-delusion, but virtually none of our current crop of smartfellas can imagine applying it to themselves, even though presumably they've read the same books we have.
When we look ahead another ten years, we see a distinct possibility that the American Empire is headed over a cliff, and that Americans at home could find themselves living in a permanent banana republic. This isn't, I think, because we've been reasoning backwards, from micro to macro, which is what someone like Jack Welch or Henry Kissinger might accuse us of, but rather because we understand the relationship between the two in moral as well as purely utilitarian terms.
It's all very well to use points and lines to illustrate the principal of discontinuity between what individuals perceive as determining their fates, and what actually determines them, but I'd maintain that the macro forces which cause empires to fail are best controlled, not by a few smart folks with an ever more impressive set of tools at their disposal, but by the seeming chaos of a more genuine democracy. Even when hardly anyone who takes part in the process can foresee exactly what the outcome of his own actions is likely to be, I believe the general outcome can scarcely be any worse than what our deluded technocrats have already led us to. I don't think, in other words, that they've made mistakes; I think that in a very profound sense, they are the mistake.