MY FRIEND J. STORRS HALL REVIEWED IN THE WSJ: ‘Where Is My Flying Car?’ That’s the title of his new book, too, which I blurbed. It’s excellent.

Excerpt:

The author gives several reasons for this dispiriting phenomenon. The first is the “Machiavelli effect.” In “The Prince,” Machiavelli wrote that innovators are opposed by “all those who have done well under the old conditions.” In scientific research, the academy tends to be full of people who have done well under the old conditions and resent novelty. They’re protected by a centralized funding system that rewards incumbents and “makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field.” These established players “are resistant to new, outside, not-Ptolemaic ideas. The ivory tower has a moat full of crocodiles.”

There are also what Mr. Hall terms “failures of nerve” and “failures of the imagination.” Failures of nerve happen when the facts are known and the challenge clear, but somehow an experiment risks yielding a result that seems outlandish—a flying machine, a rocket, factories the size of a pin. Failures of the imagination occur when we assume we know everything and rule out the vast possibilities of the unknown. Without accepting the limits of our knowledge, we will never exceed them.

Mr. Hall also blames a work-shy culture nourished since the 1960s, when Americans became so complacent about the satisfaction of their basic needs that they began to denigrate the value of technological progress. He argues that environmentalism has “essentially superseded Christianity as the default religion of Western civilization, especially in academic circles,” and has “developed into an apocalyptic nature cult, centered around climate change.” Skeptics are treated like heretics, an attitude that has frozen the science.

Another major obstacle to innovation has been regulation. The rise of product liability in the 1970s essentially killed the manufacture of private planes. Even as accident rates fell, product liability costs rose, limiting the growth of the business and killing the possibility of flying cars. Mr. Hall quotes Wilbur Wright, who said that “if you are looking for perfect safety, you would do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds.” Had the Wright Brothers had to deal with today’s Washington, D.C., they would likely have never tackled the improbable.

He has some ideas on fixing that, though.