Suppose you were to reach into the mirror universe, where everything is inverted, and pull out a book that is the exact opposite of Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

Instead of being written by a scholarly economic historian steeped in the study of the past, it would be written by an engineer who has spent his career on futuristic technology. Instead of coming from a prestigious academic press, it would be self-published, with misformatted tables and a cover featuring garish three-dimensional lettering. Instead of sticking to extremely conservative predictions about future technologies, it would speculate audaciously about the limits of the possible, from nanotech to cold fusion. Instead of a sober survey of economic history in one country and time period, it would range widely through engineering, physics and philosophy, exploring the power-to-weight ratio of jet turbines in one chapter, and describing the rise of the counterculture in the next. And instead of proclaiming the death of innovation and the end of growth, it would paint a bold vision of an ambitious technological future.

That book has leapt out of the mirror universe and into an Amazon Kindle edition (priced at 𝜋 dollars): Where Is My Flying Car? A Memoir of Future Past, by J. Storrs Hall.

Hall sets out to tackle the title question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? And indeed, several chapters in the book are devoted to deep dives on the history, engineering, and economics of flying cars. But to fully answer the question, Hall must go much broader and deeper, because he quickly concludes that the barriers to flying cars are not technological or economic—they are cultural and political. To explain the flying car gap is to explain the Great Stagnation itself.

Bold futures

The most valuable thing I took away from the book was an awareness of some powerful technological possibilities.

Flying cars

Before reading the book, I had assumed that the flying car was one of those ideas that sounds good on its face, but turns out not to work or be interesting in practice. Maybe they’re inherently too hard to fly, too dangerous, or just not all that valuable. This book changed my mind, by pointing out a simple analogy: today’s system of flight has all of the inconveniences of railroads, over a century ago. Airplanes are large, mass-transit vehicles that travel only defined, scheduled routes be...

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