But for dumb regulation, we would have cheap Nuclear Power and Supersonic planes

From the Grumpy Economist:

In the 1960s, nuclear was supposed to bring the amazing post-scarcity Jetsons future. It could have brought the amazing post-scarcity Jetsons future. But then regulators/environmentalists/the mob destroyed its potential and condemned us to fifty more years of fossil fuels. If society hadn’t kneecapped nuclear, we could have stopped millions of unnecessary coal-pollution-related deaths, avoided the whole global warming crisis, maybe even stayed on the high-progress track that would have made everyone twice as rich today. … ...

For example, consider supersonic flight. Supersonic aircraft create “sonic booms”, minor explosions that rattle windows and disturb people underneath their path. Annoyed with these booms, Congress banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. Now we’ve invented better aircraft whose booms are barely noticeable, or not noticeable at all. But because Congress banned supersonic flight - rather than sonic booms themselves - we’re stuck with normal boring 6-hour coast-to-coast flights. If aircraft progress had continued at the same rate it was going before the supersonic ban, we’d be up to 2,500 mph now (coast-to-coast in ~2 hours). Can Congress change the regulation so it bans booms and not speed? Yes, but Congress is busy, and doing it through the FAA and other agencies would take 10-15 years of environmental impact reports. ...

Supersonic flight and nuclear power are two great economic counterfactuals. Like the Chinese emperors of the 1400s who abandoned ocean sailing, our society abandoned two great technologies. Who knows what the world would look like today with abundant power and widely developed supersonic airplanes — and all the technology that would have followed from those two?