Maths pretty much is a jobs program for nerds though. It occasionally produces results that are practically useful for society but there's absolutely no way the vast majority of today's maths research falls into that category.

There are definitely exceptions, like crypto. I still think it would be pretty silly to stop maths research anyway. And anyway part of the job of maths researchers is to teach maths to undergrads and that's obviously enormously useful to society.

But on the scale of "how useful is this research to society" it's dead last after engineering, chemistry, biology, and physics. Well maybe computer science would be last actually!