What is Where Is My Flying Car? about?

Where Is My Flying Car? is J. Storrs Hall's extended argument that the rate of technological progress in the physical world—energy, transportation, manufacturing, construction—slowed dramatically after roughly 1970, and that this slowdown was not inevitable but was caused by specific policy choices, cultural shifts, and institutional failures. Hall is a nanotechnology researcher and AI scientist, and the book draws on decades of his own technical work alongside a broad reading of economic and historical literature.

Hall's diagnosis begins with energy. The postwar decades saw extraordinary growth in energy production and consumption, with nuclear power expected to deliver effectively unlimited cheap electricity. That trajectory ended around 1970, when growth in energy use per capita in the United States essentially stopped, despite continued population and economic growth. Hall argues this plateau wasn't caused by physical limits—the resources and technology for continued growth existed—but by a collapse of regulatory will, cultural attitudes toward risk, and the specific political defeat of nuclear power.

The book builds an ambitious case that the same forces that stopped nuclear energy also slowed or reversed progress in aviation (supersonic commercial flight was abandoned), chemistry (regulatory barriers multiplied), construction (high-rises became harder to build), and personal transport (car performance plateaued even as computational power exploded). Hall calls this period "The Great Stagnation" and argues that Tyler Cowen's similarly titled book identifies the symptom correctly but misdiagnoses the cause. It wasn't that the low-hanging fruit of technology had been picked; it was that the institutional environment turned hostile to the kind of risk-taking that technological progress requires.

The second half of the book is more speculative, projecting what might have been achieved—and what might yet be—in nanotechnology, molecular manufacturing, and personal air vehicles. Hall's enthusiasm for technology is evident throughout, and his technical background gives the projections more grounding than most futurism. But readers who don't share his priors about the benefits of energy abundance and minimal regulation will find the political argument one-sided. The book is at its strongest as historical diagnosis and most strained as political prescription.