Where Is My Flying Car?

A physicist's investigation into why the technological future imagined in the 1960s — flying cars, nuclear-powered abundance, routine space travel — never arrived. Hall's central argument is that energy regulation, not a lack of scientific knowledge, is the primary bottleneck: the technologies existed or were within reach, but regulatory and cultural shifts after the 1970s made them impossible to deploy. The book is an exercise in counterfactual technological history, rigorously tracing what would have been possible if energy costs had continued to fall. Hall coins the term "the Great Stagnation" independently of Tyler Cowen and provides a more technically grounded explanation for it. For product leaders, the deeper lesson is about how institutional environments determine what gets built — a dynamic that operates at every scale, from national energy policy to a company's internal incentive structures. The book is provocative, data-heavy, and deliberately contrarian in a way that rewards patient reading.