Whether it is by traditional measures, like spending on research and the number of patents registered, or less tangible but more important ones, like the number of entrepreneurial start-ups, levels of venture-capital funding or the payback from new inventions, America is invariably at the top of the league.
Wal-Mart shoppers wear outfits that range from appropriate to bizarre to some sort of tangible material that more-or-less covers their body parts.
Though different in character and intensity, this engagement is at the same time more protracted, less tangible in its aims, and perhaps more important in its consequences.
The world has been broadly successful in harnessing economic growth to improve delivery of basic needs, but rising wealth is less effective in tackling more intractable, less tangible problems like intolerance and exclusion, and policies to tackle these are needed, according to the latest Social Progress Index.
But more so than solving problems, volunteering does something more important, though less tangible.
But there is an even more important, though less tangible, reason to encourage guests online.
But Toulon have invested even more in the less tangible qualities.
Science itself is something else, something both more profound and less tangible.
Beyond the basic question of who will take up the plow, some Thais see a more immediate but less tangible threat to the society as a whole.
When Plank talks about Under Armour, he often sounds as if he were selling something more important and less tangible than performance apparel.
