The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value.
It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.)
i agree with your sentiment about the finance industry, but an economist would argue that it did create value through greater monetary velocity (which is basically buying more stuff).
but to take your points further... when the limits of tangible goods constrained by population, like housing and food, are reached, a voracious economy must move to less bounded products like (access to) money itself to continue growing. similarly, advertising created monetary velocity out of access to attention, an intangible industry relatively untapped until the 20th century unlocked it.
the long-term approach to aligning the value created by these industries with our collective expectations is of course to change the metrics by which they're evaluated, but that will take decades (just as doctrines like trickle-down economics that got us here took decades to take root). lots of people here have noted that it's not bad to find out about products you're interested in, but what we don't like is having our attention wasted on things we don't care about in an effort to manipulate us into buying things we don't really need (by exploiting information asymmetries about the value of those products).
in the meantime, we have to continue having this discussion and putting our money where our mouths are.
It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.)
[1] https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-econom...