[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.