Finance and investment banking is about resource allocation. To get the stuff like agriculture innovation etc done, you need money. You need someone to look and say, this is worth investing money in. This is far from trivial. The investment firms try to predict what technology or company is going to make something profitable. This allocation task is very important. There are many ways to fail at producing anything useful. Intent purity is not sufficient.

Of course the suspicion towards this is eternal. People always hated the traders as opposed to the farmers. But trade is crucial. And it relies on estimating what value things have and rewards correcting over the incorrect beliefs of uninformed people. This kind of information based knowledge work was always disliked by most people as it seems lazy. And for sure there are zero sum and rent seeking aspects or insider trading etc. But it's not so simple as to say that all investment and finance jobs are negative and working on farm efficiency is always better.

I'm not convinced those are the "smartest people" as much as the people with the correct ambitions and connections in the current system.

IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders?

Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead.

Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth.

Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus.

Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity.

The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors.

The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work!

It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money?

Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.