Earlier quoted context omitted.
> truly smart people are not wasting their time with work that is in any way associated with the movements of small green pieces of paper. What you call "movement of small green pieces of paper", others might call "resource allocation", which is a pivotal function in civilization-building.
I don't disagree, but I maintain that it isn't something that most of the best and brightest spend a lot of time thinking about. The fact that the acquisition of lots of money is an end in and of itself pursued by a class of skilled "elite" white collar workers (like VCs) is basically a side effect of the "resource allocation" you mention run amok coupled with faulty wiring in our monkey brains.
Acquisition of lots of money is also a proxy for impact — if you provide just $3 of value to every American, ONE TIME, congrats, you're a billionaire.
Hell, there are 7.8 billion people in the world. If you can get 1% of them to pay you a penny once a year, you're making $780k/year.
Most smart people spend a lot of time thinking about building empires. Making money is just a really nice side effect of building the empires.
In this world, there are 2 endeavors that make a LOT of money: empire building and macro resource allocation. The majority of the best and brightest will spend a lot of time thinking about those two endeavors no matter what the underlying system is. In a parallel universe where all resource allocation and production is driven by the government — your elite class will simply be in the officer ranks of those bureaucracies. It's no different from the military where the elite West Point graduates enjoy greater status than the enlisted rank-and-file.