The "questionable people" include grandparents, firemen, teachers, etc with pensions and retirement funds.

>I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. [...] I guess it's just a case of lack of empathy on my part.

Your sentiment is common and I think it's caused by people not connecting the dots from grandparents' retirement pension to the hedge fund trader.

As one example, at the micro level, grandparents are depending on a pension.[1] They also don't want their _real_ purchasing power to diminish. The "real" not "nominal" purchasing power is an important distinction because if the price of bread is $2 in 2017 but becomes $4 in 2037, they want to have adequate future money to buy food. In other words, they want their money to grow and keep up with inflation.

Your grandparents stashing money in a savings account paying less than 1% will not protect their purchasing power from inflation. Likewise, the pension manager that oversees a $1 billion retirement fund to pay retired teachers will declare it bankrupt if it only gets a 1% return by buying Treasury Bills. The pension's assumptions to avoid insolvency might require 8% or better annual returns.

Therefore, all these participants in the economy are looking for better returns. You can't get 8% from savings accounts and t-bills. That's where money managers like private equity, hedge funds, and VCs in Silicon Valley come in. They sell their ability to generate higher returns. This expertise attracts capital from entities like pension funds.

So basically, a bunch of programmers are fine tuning algorithms because [...connect a bunch of dots...] your grandmother doesn't want to be a starving destitute and live under a bridge in her retirement years. If you multiply millions of everyday people not wanting to be destitute (macro level), you end up with hedge fund managers with billions to play with.

That said, can we "reconfigure society" so that all this competitive activity of shuffling money from one pile to another isn't done? Maybe. It would involve fundamental changes that we all can't agree on. For example, if you stop inflation you can stop the incentive to generate returns that try to beat inflation; but then some would say that "deflation" would lead to people hoarding money and the economy would crash. Inflation is the current winning ideology for the modern economy. It's hard to see how we could alter society such that Wall Street traders go away.

[1] for example, the $300 billion California Public Employees pension fund provides these benefits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS#Benefits