It's not that people are stupid, it's that most things are hard.
Consider the man in the street.
Initially you would not, I submit, trust him to remove your appendix, or educate your children, or design an aircraft you were going to fly in, or pilot it, or fix your gas, or write your antivirus software, or represent you in court, or translate something from Russian to Turkish, or put out your house if it was on fire, or predict the weather, or build a house, or paint your portrait, or practically anything else.
He may well, however, by dint of years of patient study, and of training by other experts, have acquired the skill to do one or two of those things, or some similar difficult task. If so, and if he can demonstrate it, then you would entrust him to perform that task for you, and in most cases defer to him in matters concerning it without even thinking about doing so.
Now consider "run an economy" or "conduct foreign policy" in that light.
"Most people are stupid" is an obviously dumb statement, because it implies some objective standard of intelligence higher than the average. It's usually a code for "Most people are less intelligent than I am", which approximately 50% of the population can claim accurately, and probably about 90% believe to be true. But either way, it's not terribly helpful.
What *is* true is that, in any given subject, most people might as well be stupid compared to the relatively few people who have made a specialist study of that subject. But, because we mostly base our standards for "What should a human be capable of?" on people writing about things they know about, most people come across as stupid.
In an ideal world, the job of a national leader would be to be a generalist specialising in selecting specialists - knowing enough about each of the areas he has to make decisions in to know which of the various groups of people claiming to be experts in it really do know what they are talking about, and deferring to their judgement in that area.
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