this undervalues how financial engineering allows more ideas and companies to be funded

compound interest is a rare exponential force, and it is available to most citizens of a developed country through the stock market

financial futures remain important for farmers to have predictable pricing, and increase crop yields

science is limited by funding at least as much as it is limited by ideas or intelligence

I understand why finance is a popular bogeyman, but the world is rarely black and white

> this undervalues how financial engineering allows more ideas and companies to be funded

I think the comment is about the marginal utility of additional workers at Jane St over, perhaps, DE Shaw Research. The caliber and education of roughly the same kind of person might be applied to understanding drug mechanisms, or shaving off trading milliseconds.

Is the marginal benefit to the world greater if someone is advancing financial engineering? I don't think it's obvious that our increased complexity is, itself, yielding further increases in 'allowing more ideas and companies to be funded' except in the sense where already-wealthy people gain more discretionary income which they may decide to spend on their pet projects. Futures have existed for much longer than derivative markets; are we helping farmers more when we allow futures to be traded more quickly?

But I disagree that the limit is funding—it's simply a lack of concerted interest. We accept that we should spend tax money on rewarding certain financial activities, and we create a system that disproportionately rewards people who facilitate these activities. But we might restructure things so people are incentivized to do research instead of financial engineering.

I think the fundamental idea is that things of value need to be extracted or manufactured at some point and we're not set up to reward people studying new extractive tools or new manufacturing processes when those people could instead work on finance products.

I think these are totally different things. HFT firms and Hedge Funds are not "allowing more ideas to be funded". Finance in general can indeed be good but I think its much harder to argue for the net benefit of firms like Jane Street or Citadel.