I think this comes from current thinking based on past history where we were more resource constrained, embodied by this:

"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research."[0]

Where as a more technological perspective might recognize how thinking purely along the current "dollars and cents" prestige lines, and might come to realize that by seeking to sustain every human to some increasing degree, will then "free" the marginal human to help maximize along some dimension that isn't necessarily the "dollar and cents" direction (think for every high/college/grad school drop out now making ~6 figures writing software, that could be if afforded a similar style of living/degree of autonomy in life as they do today, might choose to pursue something more likely to enhance technological development[well who knows, maybe I am just speaking for myself], or those who were born into a situation where everyday was a arduous to feed themselves who then will be "free" to spend more of this time to anything but relative foraging for sustinence). This can perhaps be embodied as a solution by recognizing this:

"This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress."[0]

[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-...