[martinced]

Well the same about finance is certainly said, even by billionaires, like Warren Buffet. Paraphrasing Buffet here:

"The biggest tragedy of our time is that so many brilliant minds go work in the finance field"

and also, still Buffet: "Finance is the crumbs of capitalism".

Now I'd say that the reality is quite complicated: nearly anything that helps grow the GDP has a positive effect on technological progress.

Even finance, by providing liquidity, plays an important role. Now when a country like the UK has 8% of its GDP coming out of the city obviously there's something inherently rotten: you can't just have an economy made of nothing. 8% of finance is way, way, way too much and it doesn't take a genius to see were we're heading: major crisis after major crisis. These "brilliant minds" in finance managed to create crazy derived products totally unrelated to the fundamentals of the economy and it cannot possibly be good.

So it's all about finding a % that works, just as with everything. Let's take the "geniuses" that go into politics and raise public spending in a good Keynesian fashion to 67% of the GDP like Sweden in 1993 (recent The Economist article)... Government deficit running out of control, public debt accumulating fast and, eventually, lowering the % of public spending to saner level (49% in 2012) and reducing the public debt.

There's a place for ads. There's a place for a disrupting company like Google who brought us so many things (including a free OS for smartphones, cutting the grass under would be monopolist' feets like Apple or Microsoft). There's a place for finance. There's a place for reasonable public spendings (what there probably should be no place for are crazy socialists who are going to use intellectual terrorism to get elected and then constantly raise the power of the state and raise public spendings, constantly strangling the public sectors and destroying the entrepreneur mindset and, inevitably, leading to state default and authoritarian states).

The question is: "Which % of the economy should it represent so that we work efficiently?".

Just as with nearly everything: "Which % of the GDP should public spendings represent before there are diminishing returns?" (hint: it's way lower than what socialists think it should be but I'm still a statist: I'm not an anarchist and I do believe there should be a reasonable state).

Mostly, I'm siding with Buffet and with GP here: there are two many great minds working on too many bullshits.

[bearmf]

I work in finance. The vast majority of what quants do is meaningless work which is only (maybe) useful to their employer. Most of them, if you ask about usefulness of their work, will probably conjure some bs argument about "providing liquidity", "making markets efficient" or "controlling risk".

The reality is that people do it for the money and prefer not to think about deeper matters. Some of the work is also really interesting and cutting-edge. But if you start rationally thinking about your contribution to society, the only answer is that there is none. If you want to do something useful, you leave finance.

[Houshalter]

Well the money is coming from somewhere. There is certainly some benefit to finance as opposed to advertising which is annoying and manipulative (though to be fair it has funded Google, television, and most websites, but again, the money is coming from somewhere.)

[bearmf]

Your argument seems to be that if someone is paying you for what you are doing then you are useful to that someone. Which is of course true. But then if you are really intent on figuring out what is going on, the next question is who is paying your employer and what is your employer actually doing to earn their money. Many people conveniently forget about this step.