alt Hacker NewsThis is wildly shortsighted view of mathematics. Historically many of the subfields of math which are presently most valuable were considered useless for decades or centuries. Number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory, and Boolean algebra, to name a few.
This is false dichotomy. Many mathematical achievements were produced while looking at practical problems: Fourier is a good one. For every mathematician that accidentally made a practical contribution, there are many more that produced nothing of value, and would have with a better tuned reward function.