Where Are the Flying Cars?
Monday, September 09, 2024
Writing at the Foundation for Economic Education, economist Alex Tabarrok argues persuasively that, but for government regulations, lots of us would have been commuting via flying car by now.
Tabarrok ably captures the technical feasibility angle with multiple examples, including the nearly century-old footage embedded in this post, and with equal adroitness shows the devastating impact of regulation on the relevant sector of the aviation industry.
| It is the lack of will to rid ourselves of preventative law, not technology, that stands in the way. |
His most interesting argument he saves for last:
By far the costliest part of the FAA's regulation is not any particular standard imposed on pilot training, liability, or aircraft safety, but a slight shift in the grammatical tense of all these rules. The Department of Transportation (DOT) sets strict safety requirements for cars, but manufacturers are allowed to release new designs without first getting the DOT to sign off that all the requirements have been satisfied. The law is enforced ex post, and the government will impose recalls and fines when manufacturers fail to follow the law.Without going further, and contesting the propriety or need of such regulations, it is interesting to consider that such a small difference could be so consequential.
The FAA, by contrast, enforces all of its safety rules ex ante. Before aircraft manufacturers can do anything with a design, they have to get the FAA's signoff, which can take more than a decade. This regulatory approach also makes the FAA far more risk-averse, since any problems with an aircraft after release are blamed on the FAA's failure to catch them. With ex post enforcement, the companies that failed to follow the law would be blamed, and the FAA rewarded, for enforcing recall.
This subtle difference in the ordering of legal enforcement is the major cause of the stagnation of aircraft design and manufacturing. [links omitted, bold added]
On that score, I largely agree with Tabarrok, although I am not as sanguine about the positive effect of making the change he suggests, at least alone. In my admittedly uninformed opinion, I suspect that significant tort reform would also have to occur before we could unleash that torrent of innovation and industry.
Although I doubt we are as tantalizingly close to flying cars as Tabarrok claims, his larger point stands: Our political and legal system stand in the way.
But those arise from our culture, which, as Ayn Rand showed in her work is a consequence of the philosophical ideas championed by the dominant intellectuals and held by the majority in our culture.
That change is probably decades away, if it ever occurs, but if it does, foolishness like this will fall quickly, like so many dominoes.
-- CAV
2 comments:
The thing is, we HAVE flying cars, and have had them for a while. Including one model with FAA approval. There are significant obstacles to their wide adoption, though. They have limited range, limited passenger space, and virtually no cargo room. This limits their utility to a level below that which most people would consider necessary. I can't take my kids to practice, then stop by the grocery store, then grab the dog food on the way home in a flying car.
Flying cars, like bikes, are an option only for single people without kids who don't need to go very far. Once you add kids or significant distance to the equation, current models simply will not get the job done, even if they were as cheap as regular cars (which they aren't).
I imagine Tabarrok would counter that the preventative regulatory regime has made the sector unattractive to the kinds of innovation that could produce something more useful to people like us, and which could stimulate the kind of market demand that would drive prices down.
That said, there would need to be something like traffic law in place to handle the many foreseeable circumstances widespread use of such vehicles would entail.
Gus
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