If someone told you that there was a trillion dollars a year just sloshing around and you could help apply some pressure to allocate it more sensibly, you would do it. Therefore, I have a high prior on politics being a reasonable way to change the world, since politics controls huge sums of money and labor, on the order of trillions of dollars per year.

Many people claim that politics is very low-value, but frankly, I'm suspicious of those people, since they are usually pushing a policy agenda that amounts to, "Reduce the amount of assets politics can affect or mobilize by handing those assets over to me and my campaign contributors." This was tried in the Eastern Bloc, to devastating results.

So I tend to think that claiming, "politics is weak, stupid, and low-value, and only for weak, stupid people who can't do something worthwhile with themselves in the private sector" is actually a very political signalling strategy used to directly acquire wealth and power as a one-time purchase, without all the nasty business about repeatedly winning elections to keep the wealth and power.