I'm sure you can cherry pick overseas examples, but if you look at the progress of the US in the 1900's there's a clear pattern:

When intellectuals were in charge, or at least given authority by the politicians, things got much better. When they weren't, things got much worse. Examples include the Great Depression and (fast forwarding to the 2000's) the financial crisis, COVID (Trump fired the disease response team that stopped SARS-v1, and that would have been the early response to COVID before it left China.) He also ignored nearly-universal warnings from economists that his policies would cause the inflation that Biden was later blamed for.

On the intellectual side, we have things like the New Deal, the Apollo Program, well-run public education that led the US to be a superpower (and has now been gutted), etc, etc.