Step back and consider the immense intellect and creativity being devoted to just making money.
Or arguing on the internet.
Just a teeny portion of our species' intellectual output winds up creating or discovering anything of real value, but that's fine, we muddle through nonetheless. The finance industry has its role to play in ensuring the lights stay on and there's food in the supermarket.
The biggest difference between my example and your examples is that it's a job. This talent pool is using their working hours (and quite often most of their waking hours) pursuing a goal that provides almost nothing to society.
The "finance industry" that we're talking about here is self-serving and in most cases is having no positive relationship with the lights or the supermarket.
The transportation industry, by comparison, has a profit motive but ultimately turns human creativity and intellect into things that arguably make life better for a large number of people.
Given that we've chosen money as our method of resource allocation, it makes sense people who want access to more resources would try to optimise their profit building strategies, and smarter people are going to make better choices. It is why financial hubs, such as London or New York, have more resources to play with and so can provide a higher quality of living.
Wall Street is a welfare program for traders, underwritten by the taxpayers and paying for the financial sector’s total losses in 1929, 1973 and 2008.