Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?

A 2022 contest finalist reviewing J. Storrs Hall's Where's My Flying Car? — clear, engaging, and well-balanced. Lays out Hall's causal chain for the Great Stagnation (growth/energy flatlined ~1970 because we failed to adopt nuclear, because of excessive regulation, because of 'green fundamentalism'), with the Rosling wealth-levels framing ('there is no Level 5'), the detailed flying-car technical history (feasible since the 1930s; killed by regulation, not physics), the nuclear-fear analysis (Chernobyl ~43 deaths; Fukushima's radiophobic evacuation killed more than the radiation), the nanotech-lost-to-material-science-for-grant-money story, the surprising government-funded-science-is-bad claim, and Hall's machine-learning/back-propagation analogy for why markets learn better than bureaucracies. The reviewer adds fair critique (the political analysis is the weakest, a conventional libertarian anti-regulation case; more afraid of climate change than Hall) and identifies the book's real value as 'definite optimism.'

Quality 74 · Strong. Strong-finalist band: a lucid, engaging review that makes a provocative thesis land while critically flagging its weaknesses; sits with the good guest reviews (74-77).

Claude’s paradigm shift 54 · Moderate. Notable: the energy-flatlining/Great-Stagnation and 'definite optimism' framings are transmitted vividly, building on Hall.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Within-discourse: shapes progress-studies/nuclear discourse among readers; no material reach.