It's true that I am saying they're dumb, but I also qualify two important things - first is not only incompetence, but coordination and incentive issue. Even smart bureaucrats don't care enough to do anything, even the members of the state mafia are that invested in it. Most sovereign investment funds are underperforming.
But the most important is to cut the tail of the upside. You're dealing with complex systems and that means (due to Wolfram's principle of computational irreducibility) that no amount of intelligence will allow you to perform manipulation of complex systems with any kind of reasonable certainty. At this level, smart is not enough, you enter a territory of unpredictability pretty fast. And once there, it's like a black hole, no way out.
