How prescient was Herbert Hoover?

Among the other things Herbert Hoover figured out was this (from WSJ 1930):

While the active govt. and private efforts to relieve unemployment in the current emergency are the stuff of front page news, it's less well known that a nonpartisan committee of 15 eminent figures from various fields has been making a long-term study of the problem. The body, known as the Committee on Recent Economic Changes, was set up by the President during the last depression in 1921; members include William Green, John Raskob, Eugene Meyer, and Owen Young. The Committee's fact-finding organization, the Nat'l. Bureau of Economic Research is getting help from many other govt. and private sources to put together a statistical picture of a full economic cycle. The idea is not to develop a system of rigid economic control, but to painstakingly start to develop an understanding of economic actions and reactions, to be applied by all in their own fields. Editorial: It's reassuring that this undertaking "which so many fervidly demand" has already been underway since 1921 with a group of such unquestionable qualifications, and that it has shunned publicity, preconceived doctrines, and extravagant promises.

Today? Says Wiki:

The NBER was founded in 1920. Its first staff economist and Director of Research was Wesley Mitchell. Simon Kuznets was working at the NBER when the U.S. government asked him to help organize a system of national accounts in 1930, which was the beginning of the official measurement of GDP and other related indices of economic activity. Due to its work on national accounts and business cycles, the NBER is well-known for providing start and end dates for recessions in the United States.

The NBER is the largest economics research organization in the United States.^[2] Sixteen of the thirty-one American winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics have been NBER associates, as well as three of the past Chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers, including the former NBER president, Martin Feldstein. NBER research is published by the University of Chicago Press.

I still am amazed at Keynesians who disparage the politician most responsible for the greatest productivity push in history. As secretary of commerce, he established the rules and partnerships that made modern mass market suburbia possible. He is becoming my favorite president.

Even though he was disparaged by libertarians as too interventionist.