Not not a head for wise decisions, which usually manifest themselve (though not always) in worldly success.
Look at the financial page. If you’d sunk $20,000 in stock for a particular, one time, hot, sub prime lender, it would be worth than $1,000 today.
Look at all the folks walking away and all the folks involved in the companies that are tanking. Then step back and look at the morons who decided that the market needed no oversight - almost all would be the proper gentile folks you seem to think are better equipped to run the country. But they all look pretty stupid and socially irresponsible to me, not exactly what one would want in a ruling class.
It is an utter myth that socio-economic success (or failure) is principally, or even largely coupled to self determination. Middle class America generally doesn’t exist unless we create it. Be it in land grants (the upper crust wanted to sell all that western land to payoff the national debt), the massive GI bill after WW-II, or social security and medicare (picture yourself paying $100000 a year for Grandmas care).
When we stop promoting fiscal mobility, low and behold, it vanishes.
I happen to be fortunate. I actually grew up in a pretty modest blue collar household, but after coming back from Vietnam I got enough scholarship and federal money so that I could work through school, and then got very lucky with some startup businesses. All luck? No, I worked hard, but I am not self delusional enough to believe that I’d be where I am today if I’d been born on the same day, at the same time, but in a slum in Calcutta or even a tenament in the ‘wrong’ part of Baltimore.