If you only read the first 3 chapters, you might imagine that this is the history of just one industry (or the mysterious lack of an industry). But this book attributes the absence of that industry to a broad set of problems that are keeping us poor. J. Storrs Hall (aka Josh) looks at the post-1970 slowdown in innovation that Cowen describes in The Great Stagnation[1]. The two books agree on many symptoms, but describe the causes differently: where Cowen says we ate the low hanging fruit, Josh says it's due to someone "spraying paraquat on the low-hanging fruit". The book is full of mostly good insights. It significantly changed my opinion of the Great Stagnation. The book jumps back and forth between polemics about the Great Strangulation (with a bit too much outrage p*rn), and nerdy descriptions of engineering and piloting problems. I found those large shifts in tone to be somewhat disorienting - it's like the author can't decide whether he's an autistic youth who is eagerly describing his latest obsession, or an angry old man complaining about how the world is going to hell (I've met the author at Foresight conferences, and got similar but milder impressions there). Josh's main explanation for the Great Strangulation is the rise of Green fundamentalism[2], but he also describes other cultural / political factors that seem related. But before looking at those, I'll look in some depth at three industries that exemplify the Great Strangulation. The good old days of Science Fiction The absence of flying cars is used as an argument against futurists' ability to predict technology. This can't be dismissed as just a minor error of some obscure forecasters. It was a widespread vision of leading technologists. Josh provides a decent argument that we should treat that absence as a clue to why U.S. economic growth slowed in the 1970s, and why growth is still disappointing. Were those SF writers clueless optimists, making mostly random forecasting errors? No! Josh shows that for the least energy intensive technologies, their optimism was about right, and the more energy intensive the technology was, the more reality let them down. Is it just a coincidence that people started worshiping energy conservation around the start of the Great Stagnation? Josh says no, we developed ergophobia - no, not the standard meaning of ergophobia: Josh has redefined it to mean fear of using energy. Did flying cars prove to be technically harder than expected? Josh describes, in more detail than I wanted, a wide variety of plausible approaches to building flying cars. None of them clearly qualify as low-hanging fruit, but they also don't look farther from our grasp than did flying machines in 1900. How serious were the technical obstacles? Josh calculates that there's room for a million non-pressurized aircraft at one time, under current rules about distance between planes (assuming they're spread out evenly; it doesn't say all Tesla employees can land near their office at 9am). And he points out that seagull tornadoes (see this video) provide hints that current rules are many orders of magnitude away from any hard limits. Regulators' fear of problems looks like an obstacle, but it's unclear whether anyone put much thought into solving them, and it doesn't look like the industry got far enough for this issue to be very important. Skill But we didn't get close the point where that was a large obstacle to further adoption. And 21st century technology is making progress toward convenient ways of connecting competent pilots with people who want to fly, except where it's actively discouraged.
The leading SF writers of the mid 20th century made predictions for today that looked somewhat close to what we got in many areas, with a big set of exceptions in the areas around transportation and space exploration.
The simple answer is: mostly no. The people who predicted flying cars knew a fair amount about the difficulty, and we may have forgotten more than we've learned since then.
Air traffic control
Before reading this book, I assumed that there were serious technical problems here. In hindsight, that looks dumb.
It seems unlikely that anywhere near as many people would learn to fly competently as have learned to drive. So this looks like a large obstacle for the average family, given 20th century technology.
Cost
If the economic growth of 1945-1970 had continued, we'd be approaching wealth levels where people on a UBI ... oops, I mean on a national basic income could hope to afford an occasional ride in a flying Uber that comes to their door. At least if there were no political problems that drove up costs.
Weather
Weather will make flying cars a less predictable means than ground cars to get to a given destination. That seems to explain a modest fraction of people's reluctance to buy flying cars, but that explains at most a modest part of the puzzle.
Safety
"The leading cause of death among active pilots is ... motorcycle accidents."
I wasn't able to verify that, and other sources say that general aviation is roughly as dangerous as motorcycles. Motorcycles are dangerous enough that they'd likely be illegal if they hadn't been around before the Great Strangulation, so whether either of those are considered safe enough seems to depend on accidents of history.
People have irrational fears of risk, but there has also been a rational trend of people demanding more safety because we can now afford more safety. I expect this is a moderate part of why early SF writers overestimated demand for flying cars.
The liability crisis seems to have hit general aviation harder than it hit most other industries. I'm still unclear why.
"One of the more ironic regulatory pathologies that has shaped the world of general aviation is that most of the planes we fly are either 40 years old or homemade - and that we were forced into that position in the name of safety."
If the small aircraft industry hadn't mostly shut down, it's likely that new planes would have more safety features (airbags? whole-airplane parachutes?).
The flying car industry hit a number of speedbumps, such as WWII diverting talent and resources to other types of aviation, then a key entrepreneur being distracted by a patent dispute, and then was largely shut down by liability lawsuits. It seems like progress should have been a bit faster around 1950-1970 - I'm confused as to whether the industry did well then.
At any rate, it looks like liability lawsuits were the industry's biggest problem, and they combined with a more hostile culture and expensive energy to stop progress around 1980.
The book shifted my opinion from "those SF writers were confused" to "flying cars should be roughly as widespread as motorcycles". We should be close to having autopilots which eliminate the need for human pilots (and the same for motorcycles?), and then I'd consider it somewhat reasonable for the average family to have a flying car.
Nuclear Power
Josh emphasizes the importance of cheap energy for things such as flying cars, space travel, eradicating poverty, etc., and identifies nuclear power as the main technology that should have made energy increasingly affordable. So it seems important to check his claims about what went wrong with nuclear power.
He cites a study by Peter Lang, with this strange learning curve: 
It shows a trend of costs declining with experience, just like a normal industry where there's some competition and where consumers seem to care about price. Then that trend was replaced by a clear example of cost disease[3]. I've previously blogged about the value of learning curves (aka experience curve effects) in forecasting.
This is pretty inconsistent with running out of low-hanging fruit, and is consistent with a broad class of political problems, including the hypothesis of hostile regulation, and also the hypothesis that nuclear markets were once competitive, then switched to having a good deal of monopoly power.
This is a pretty strong case that something avoidable went wrong, but leaves a good deal of uncertainty about what went wrong, and Josh seemed a little too quick to jump to the obvious conclusion here, so I investigated further[4]. I couldn't find anyone arguing that nuclear power hit technical problems around 1970, but then it's hard to find many people who try to explain nuclear cost trends at all.
This book chapter suggests there was a shift from engineering decisions being mostly made by the companies that were doing the construction, to mostly being determined by regulators. Since regulators have little incentive to care about cost, the effect seems fairly similar to the industry becoming a monopoly. Cost disease seems fairly normal for monopolies.
That chapter also points out the effects of regulatory delays on costs: "The increase in total construction time ... from 7 years in 1971 to 12 years in 1980 roughly doubled the final cost of plants."[5]
In sum, something went wrong with nuclear power. The problems look more political than technical. The resulting high cost of energy slowed economic progress by making some new technologies too expensive, and by diverting talent to energy conservation. And by protecting the fossil fuel industries, it caused millions of deaths, and maybe 174 Gt of unnecessary CO2 emissions (about 31% of all man-made CO2 emissions).
This book convinced me that I'd underestimated how important nuclear power could have been.
Nanotech
"So the technology of the Second Atomic Age will be a confluence of two strongly synergistic atomic technologies: nanotech and nuclear."
The book has a chapter on the feasibility of Feynman / Drexler style nanotech, which attempts to find a compromise between Drexler's excruciatingly technical Nanosystems and his science-fiction style Engines of Creation. That compromise will convince a few people who weren't convinced by Drexler, but most people will either find it insufficiently technical, or else hard to follow because it requires a good deal of technical knowledge.
Josh explains some key parts of why the government didn't fund research into the Feynman / Drexler vision of nanotech: centralization and bureaucratization of research funding, plus the Machiavelli Effect - the old order opposes change, and beneficiaries of change "do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them."
Josh describes the mainstream reaction to nanotech fairly well, but that's not the whole story.
Why didn't the military fund nanotech? Nanotech would likely exist today if we had credible fears of Al Qaeda researching it in 2001. But my fear of a nanotech arms race exceeds my desire to use nanotech.
Many VCs would get confused by top academics who dismissed (straw-man versions of) Drexler's vision. But there are a few VCs such as Steve Jurvetson who understand Drexler's ideas well enough to not be confused by that smoke. With those VCs, the explanation is no entrepreneurs tried a sufficiently incremental path
Most approaches to nanotech require a long enough series of development steps to achieve a marketable product that VCs won't fund them. That's not a foolish mistake on VCs part - they have sensible reasons to think that some other company will get most of the rewards (how much did Xerox get from PARC's UI innovations?). Josh promotes an approach to nanotech that seems more likely to produce intermediate products which will sell. As far as I know, no entrepreneurs attempted to follow that path (maybe because it looked too long and slow?).
The patent system has been marketed as a solution to this kind of problem, but it seems designed for a hedgehog-like model of innovation, when what we ought to be incentivizing is a more fox-like innovation process.
Mostly there isn't a good system of funding technologies that take more than 5 years to generate products.
If government funding got this right during the golden age of SF, the hard questions should be focused more on what went right then, than on what is wrong with funding now. But I'm guessing there was no golden age in which basic R&D got appropriate funding, except when we were lucky enough for popular opinion to support the technologies in question.
Problems with these three industries aren't enough to explain the stagnation, but Josh convinced me that the problems which affected these industries are more pervasive, affecting pretty much all energy-intensive technologies.
Culture and politics
"Of all the great improvements in know-how expected by the classic science-fiction writers, competent government was the one we got the least."
I'll focus now on the underlying causes of stagnation.
Green fundamentalism and ergophobia are arguably sufficient to explain the hostility to nuclear power and aviation, but it's less clear how they explain the liability crisis or the stagnation in nanotech.
Josh also mentions a variety of other cultural currents, each of which explain some of the problems. I expect these are strongly overlapping effects, but I won't be surprised if they sound as disjointed as they did in the book.
It matters whether we fear an all-seeing god. From the book Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict:
In a civilization where a belief in a Big God is effectively universal, there is a major advantage in the kind of things you can do collectively. In today's America, you can't be trusted to ride on an airliner with a nail file. How could you be trusted driving your own 1000-horsepower flying car? ... The green religion, on the other hand, instead of enhancing people's innate conscience, tends to degrade it, in a phenomenon called "licensing." People who virtue-signal by buying organic products are more likely to cheat and steal[6]
From Peter Turchin: when an empire becomes big enough to stop worrying about external threats to its existence, the cooperative "we're all in the same boat" spirit is replaced by a "winner take all" mentality.
"the evolutionary pressures to what we consider moral behavior arise only in non-zero-sum interactions. In a dynamic, growing society, people can interact cooperatively and both come out ahead. In a static no-growth society, pressures toward morality and cooperation vanish;"
Self deception is less valuable on a frontier where you're struggling with nature than it is when most struggles involve social interaction, where self-deception makes virtue signaling easier.
"If your neighbor is Saving the Planet, it seems somehow less valuable merely to keep clean water running".
"Technologies that provoke antipathy and promote discord, such as social networks, are the order of the day; technologies that empower everyone but require a background of mutual trust and cooperation, such as flying cars, are considered amusing anachronisms."
Those were Josh's points. I'll add these thoughts:
It's likely that cultural changes led competent engineers to lose interest in working for regulatory agencies. I don't think Josh said that explicitly, but it seems to follow fairly naturally from what he does say.
Josh refers to Robin Hanson a fair amount, but doesn't mention Robin's suggestion that increasing wealth lets us return to forager values. "Big god" values are clearly farmer values.
Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations (listed in the bibliography, without explanation), predicted in 1982 that special interests would be an increasing drag on growth in stable nations. His reasoning differs a fair amount from Josh's, but their conclusions sound fairly similar.
Josh often focuses on Greens as if they're a large part of the problem, but I'm inclined to focus more on the erosion of trust and cooperation, and treat the Greens more as a symptom.
The most destructive aspects of Green fundamentalism can be explained by special interests, such as coal companies and demagogues, who manipulate long-standing prejudices for new purposes. How much of Great Strangulation was due to special interests such as coal companies? I don't know, but it looks like the coal industry would have died by 2000 (according to Peter Lang) if the pre-1970 trends in nuclear power had continued.
Green religious ideas explain hostility to energy-intensive technologies, but I have doubts about whether that would be translated into effective action. Greens could have caused cultural changes that shifted the best and the brightest away from wealth creation and toward litigation.
That attempt to attribute the stagnation mainly to Greens seems a bit weaker than the special interests explanation. But I remain very uncertain about whether there's a single cause, or whether it took several independent errors to cause the stagnation.
What now? I don't see how we could just turn on a belief in a big god. The book says we'll likely prosper in spite of the problems discussed here, but leaves me a bit gloomy about achieving our full potential.
The book could use a better way of labeling environmentalists who aren't Green fundamentalists. Josh clearly understands that there are big differences between Green fundamentalists and people with pragmatic motives for reducing pollution or preserving parks. Even when people adopt Green values mostly for signaling purposes, there are important differences between safe rituals, such as recycling, and signals that protect the coal industry.
Yet standard political terminology makes it sound like attacks on the Greens signal hostility to all of those groups. I wish Josh took more care to signal a narrower focus of hostility.
Ironically for a book that complains about virtue signaling, a fair amount of the book looks like virtue signaling. Maybe that gave him a license to ignore mundane things like publicizing the book (I couldn't find a mention of the book on his flying car blog until 3 months after it was published).
Has the act of writing this review licensed me to forget about being effective? I'm a bit worried.
[continued on my blog.]
