How do quants contribute to society?

[rrusczyk]

Oh boy, I'm not stepping into that one...

[mathemonster]

Or John could justify it to himself by saying that the money he will earn being a quant, he will use to better society

[Different]

John, I am with you on this one

Quants benefit the society as much as, for example, professional poker players. Don't buy this "allocation of capital" nonsense...money shuffling isn't allocation of capital.
Venture capitalists are involved in allocation of capital, not quants....

This is from Paul Volcker interview...
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0811s.pdf

"Well I found myself sitting next to Bill Sharpe, a Nobel
Prize winner for helping to invent fi nancial engineering. So I nudged him and asked, ”What’s this all about? What does
it do for the GNP or productivity?” He whispered back to
me, ”Nothing.” Which is not the answer that I expected. I
said, “What does it do?” He said, “Well you know, it changes
around all the rents in the fi nancial system and besides, it’s a
lot of intellectual fun.”
Now I don’t know about the intellectual fun, but I’m not
sure that fi nancial engineering has produced much in the rate
of growth or productivity in the real world. We would have
just as much employment without it. But that’s what we’re
spending all our time on. It sure has created some enormous
wealth for relatively few people, including for some universities
I guess. "

[modelist]