It's interesting to try to compare finance and tech on whether or not they are beneficial to society. epsilon improvements can be quite useful to society. Clear

It's interesting to try to compare finance and tech on whether or not they are beneficial to society. epsilon improvements can be quite useful to society. Clearly some amount of both is useful, but I'd argue that finance has run its course in the sense that pretty much all incremental "improvements" made by finance are basically hurting society.[1] This is because while things like market making are obviously necessary, you've got to ask yourself: does making trades on a timescale of microseconds or even less as opposed to making trades on a timescale of minutes lead to better outcomes in the real economy? The answer is almost certainly "no", but at the same time, trading firms that are engaged in zero-sum games are still able to siphon a lot of money from the rest of the economy that goes into just that. So the net outcome for society of that is clearly negative. We shouldn't be kidding ourselves, though. A lot of the incremental improvements in tech these days are also net negatives to society. Mostly this is because so much of tech is driven by advertisement. However, there are large parts of tech, including some very traditional parts, in which improvements are clearly beneficial to society, e.g. when it comes to building more powerful and efficient hardware. [1] An exception might be entirely new sub-sectors of finance that explicitly target beneficial outcomes. Climate finance comes to mind.