I think you’re looking at this wrong. This rule was originally created in 1933 to mitigating societal economic risk.
The reason why having money was the objective definition was because defining expertise objectively is difficult. (What are you going to do? Have a standardized test?) This problem still remains.
Like you said, having money doesn’t make you a savvy investor. However, you can typically absorb the losses with comparatively less pain. Also, since you have more money, you can make more investments, which means you gain experience, and thus hopefully better at avoiding bad investments.
Funny you should say that because they do have standardized tests. Any of three certifications qualifies you.
The other non-financial individual qualification is also objective. Are you a certain type of employee of an investment firm? If so you can invest in that firm. None of this is subjective.
If this were about whether you can absorb losses, then it would limit the investment amount based on your financial capacity, like the JOBS Act does. There's nothing stopping a millionaire from throwing too much of their savings into questionable investments, and plenty of millionaires have gone broke doing exactly that. They probably would have been better off if they had to pass those standardized tests first, like us po' folks are able to do now.
Ironically, the accredited investor income and net worth criteria haven’t been updated since 1983. If the criteria has been indexed to inflation, you’d need a salary of $530k or a net worth of $2.6M.
The reason why having money was the objective definition was because defining expertise objectively is difficult. (What are you going to do? Have a standardized test?) This problem still remains.
Like you said, having money doesn’t make you a savvy investor. However, you can typically absorb the losses with comparatively less pain. Also, since you have more money, you can make more investments, which means you gain experience, and thus hopefully better at avoiding bad investments.