This seems like an odd point in time to be singing the glories of how smart elites are. The presumably pretty smart elites in the financial industry have just screwed up big time. This has become so common that it has generated an entire subgenre of finance books. Are these guys "full of life", or full of something else?

Intelligence is often devoted to optimizing the wrong things. It's overrated. The ability to optimize some quantity is not what you should be optimizing.