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The e orN Times Four years ago Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, abruptly canceled America’s biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson 5iver. Count me among those who blame his presidential ambitions, and believe that he was trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating 5epublican base.

(ven as one tunnel was being canceled, however, another was nearing completion, as Spread Networks finished boring its way through the Allegheny 0ountains of Pennsylvania. Spread’s tunnel was not, however, intended to carry passengers, or even freight it was for a fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds — three-thousandths of a second — off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn’t tells you a lot about what’s wrong with America today.

Who cares about three milliseconds The answer is, high-freTuency traders, who make money by buying or selling stock a tiny fraction of a second faster than other players. Not surprisingly, 0ichael Lewis starts his best-selling new book “Flash Boys,” a polemic against high-freTuency trading, with the story of the Spread Networks tunnel. But the real moral of the tunnel tale is independent of 0r. Lewis’s polemic.

Think about it. You may or may not buy 0r. Lewis’s depiction of the high-freTuency types as villains and those trying to thwart them as heroes. If you ask me, there are no good guys in this story.) But either way, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to save three milliseconds looks like a huge waste. And that’s part of a much broader picture, in which society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.

How much waste are we talking about A paper by Thomas Philippon of New York 8niversity puts it at several hundred billion dollars a year.