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In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.
The maze has you, Neo; doing these is not prosocial or something that should be aspired to. The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.
If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well? Of course, day trading usually doesn't (and for the purposes of the entire economy the number of people who support themselves off of it is a rounding error to zero), and yes maybe the Iphone designer produces value only by harnessing pointless fashion cycles, but a) this is a symptom of a wealthy society that there is enough excess productive value to be poured into what is fashion, and b) the average white collar American is not a DEI officer or Iphone designer, they are in prosaic but necessary fields like logistics or accounts.
Well, "negative-sum" doesn't mean an activity doesn't pay well, or even that it doesn't provide value to an organisation paying you in excess of what they're paying you - it just means that it hurts others by more.
To give an obvious example, fraud is highly profitable, but it's negative-sum; it hurts the fraud victims (and those who have to put in effort to not become victims) more than it benefits the fraudster. A less-obvious example is modern advertising - there is certainly a positive-sum component to advertising (specifically, creating awareness of deals) but there's also a negative-sum component (specifically, manipulating the advertisee into taking deals that do not benefit him) and as marketing psychology has improved that negative-sum component has grown very large (if I were Czar, I'd at least consider requiring advertisements to be as unsophisticated as 1930s ones; 1930s advertising, when it wasn't just straight-up fraud, was clearly overall positive-sum). Zvi makes a case that online gambling is negative-sum, despite it being profitable. There's a case that TikTok and other social media are negative-sum, and while certainly some of these are unprofitable others aren't, which is related to why I think an outright "smartphones were a mistake" is a colourable position (certainly I've specifically avoided getting one for myself).
There are a bunch of profitable negative-sum activities around. Obviously, a lot of them wind up illegal, because this is like the 101-level case for where governmental intervention can benefit everyone, but a lot are legal at any given time due to either novelty or potential collateral damage/political costs of attempting to stamp them out.
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If you're a Luddite; I see no other way to object to designing iPhones. Day trading is volunteering to be a cog in the machine which discovers prices, which is useful (most people who try end up as lubricant instead of cog, which is why you probably shouldn't do it). DEI compliance is net negative of course, but there are easier ways to get rid of them which Trump has already started doing.
Dubai has only the day traders. Singapore has only the day traders and the DEI compliance officers (a bit different than the US version). The US, a great power, has all three. So does China (at least including Hong Kong), another great power candidate at least. So does South Korea. So does Finland.
With respect to smartphones: yes, I'm a Luddite. Zvi's made the case at length regarding the depression epidemic. Also, since I know you don't like SJ, and it's pretty obvious that smartphones helped it nucleate by bringing normies and, well, women onto the Internet, the only hole I can currently see through which you can maybe wriggle out of damning them for that would be to claim that (smartphones helped the alt-right more than they helped SJ ∩ the rise in culture war temperature from amplifying both sides is outweighed by the differential).
The literal iPhone i.e. Apple smartphone also has a business model heavily based around fashion cycles. Fashion cycles are waste, pure relative-at-expense-of-absolute.
I'm generally of the view that this beach can tolerate wooden shacks but that building multi-storey brick buildings on it is asking for trouble.
To be clear, "building a society on those" =/= "having those in existence". The USA, USSR and PRC all built their power on manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.
Unless it's iPhones being manufactured, presumably?
I'd split hairs to some degree regarding manufacturing vs. marketing, but I'll admit to a flub there.
(I'm not at 100%; I've been doing a circadian rhythm loop-de-loop the past, uh, two? three? days. I think I've been up for nearly 24 hours, though I'm barely even sure of that at this point. Might try and sort this out after some sleep; I don't think attempting it now would be productive.)
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There's nothing in particular positive-sum about manufacturing compared to other things. Manufacturing things people don't want, or at least less than they'd want the raw materials, is negative sum
As for the USSR... have you noticed it isn't around any more?
And the USSR did exactly that- it turned perfectly good raw materials into products no one wanted and paid for it with the money from exporting oil.
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