> is that gaming financial markets is the only real application of anything scientific

medicine (living longer, curing disease, vaccines, etc), cheaper energy, cheaper transportation, cheaper construction, cheaper food, better communication, new forms of entertainment, just off the top of my head.

I've sort of come around on this. Yes, everything you listed is valuable and good. But the reality is all of it was built with money that came from banks and investors. The only reason to do anything scientific is to get investors to give you money. If you do something scientific that does not make people want to give you money you will impact no lives. In this way gaming financial markets is indeed the only point to doing anything ambitious at all.

If you’re saying that economics is a foundational driver of progress, then yes - almost by definition.

Banks and investors provide liquidity to the system, which is just one of many things the market demands.

Take particle physics for example, the LHC was incredibly expensive and most people's life won't be better that that we've found the Higgs field. It was also not paid by investors but public money.

There are quite a lot of science that's basic research and it's done for scientific curiosity only with no clear way of translating that to marketable applications.

That’s an extreme example. To @jonah’s point, you could also decide to work for (or build) a profitable company that solves the issues he mentioned —- without having to « embed » it into financial gaming.

Academia is primarily funded by the government through grants.

> "most people's life won't be better that that we've found the Higgs field."

on one hand, I feel you should append "...yet" into that thought. just because it hasn't been useful technologically now doesn't mean it never will.

on the other hand, I've seen some physicists doubt that quarks even exist out of a controversy about Feynman's allegedly missing diagrams

This sounds… kind of obvious? Very few entities are non profits or governments. Of course companies specializing in science are in for the $$$…

What does that even mean? How is the atomic bomb not real?

The atomic bomb is used very much today to influence markets, to be fair.