When I think of string theory, the first thing that pops into my head is "mathematically sophisticated theory that sucked in a generation of physicists but is dead now because it doesn't make any testable predictions".
But some of the fancy math in this area is turning out to be helpful for QFT calculations, and it's becoming clear that we need more powerful math to even formulate proper quantum field theories. Check this article out for a briefing:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-at-the-heart-of-p...
Compared to what? Civilization spends on a lot of speculative stuff. Venture capital is the art of investing in failures 999 times out of 1000. And personally I'd rather have tens of billions spent on speculative theory research than on, say, Meta's VR boondoggle.
I believe the lesson here is not that we shouldn't invest in speculative theory research. It's that we need more breadth, we need to not get stuck researching only one option.
I for one would much rather seen millions of person-years spent on plumbing the depths of various bits of theory, than have that same energy directed towards making ads/social-media/consumerism better. Not exactly the same “circles”, but the point still stands.
