It's not the case though that what's most "productive" in the economic sense is also necessarily the most socially desirable outcome. The economy might be optimizing for some objective of productivity (though it's probably imperfect at that by any measure), but I don't think we can reduce it to something simple like "more overall money / goods / services = better", unless we also start looking in more detail at how those are distributed among different groups of people, and what kind of real value it is providing to them.
Of course. But that is again, in the purview of the political arena. Nevertheless, society’s resources are limited, need to be allocated, and hence the work that many do in finance.
A better way is always welcome, but I have yet to read about it or see it.
