What if the work these folks do to increase market efficiency does produce real-world value, as slower verifiable economic information would increase periods of uncertainty and price slippages?
Or the HFT engineers producing research and products that speed up general compute, such as accelerating SHA and ED25519 signature verification, so that their trading shops get information faster?
I wonder if there are actually a lot of third-order, downstream effects that society gets by paying engineers to just make computers and telecommunications faster.
Slippage in the price of cabbages at my corner market? I don't think so.
There's very good evidence that as the finance sector grows to be a larger portion of the economy (which it very much is compared to 50 years ago) that increasing inequality goes along with it, as the profits made in the finance sector are mostly rent seeking from the rest of the economy. You could also interpret it as a private tax on all other economic activity.
Just look at UK... Largely based on finance sector and it does look pretty bleak for those outside... And I am not even sure if that is yet the end state...
There is some value there, but the cut they get is likely too large already. Then again it is all just fake numbers...
I don't really want to start a debate on how HFT produces real-world value, but just consider that if these things you talk about are really useful and valuable, they might also provide competitive salaries to attract people?
What pays the most only loosely correlates with what produces the most value for society. It's easy to skim a percent here and there off hundreds of billions in volume shuffling around without the owners of those billions caring much, but it's much more difficult to see how that, on the whole, actually improves the condition of your neighborhood.
